What Taking On Google Taught Me About Startup Traction | Hacker News Reader

What Taking On Google Taught Me About Startup Traction

fastcompany.com

36 pointskareemm10 comments

I tried using DDG... I used it for over a year. But I gave up - the search is seriously lacking. It's minor for large things, but really noticeable for more obscure searches. I went back to Google when I made my new computer 10 months ago and I will never take search for granted again.

Now, to have a little privacy with Google, I just use SEARCHONYMOUS which automatically avoids using my signed in email account for search and YouTube.

For me the bangs are a killer feature.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Does Google have an equivalent?

site:

This is a killer feature for me as well. Unfortunately DDG's results for other things lack compared to Google, like searching for specific technical things like "how do I do this in code" or "wtf computer why are you doing this specific thing". Google's also a lot more helpful with forum threads in their results.

Yes, you can customize Chrome's search box in "Manage Search Engines". I've setup a few frequent searches -- w=wikipedia, am=amazon, anything-you-want for site:anysite etc.

That feature is in almost every browser, and has been for a while. And it's great if you only use one computer all the time.

But I have my phone, my iPad, my personal desktop, my personal laptop, my work desktop, etc. Using the browser's custom search feature means I have to add custom search engines to every browser on every machine I use, OR I have to setup syncing between them all, which I really don't want to do, and isn't even really possible between e.g. Safari on iPhone and Opera on Linux. And even if that were easy, I really don't want to sync browsers on my personal machines with my work machines. It's a lot easier to just set the search engine to DDG, or go to the website and use !whatever from there.

I've been using DDG for a few years now, and I've been very happy with the search results. The biggest weak spot, IMO, is that they don't index as many old mailing lists and forums as Google. The only times I ever need Google are when I'm looking for very specific or obscure error messages which aren't always covered in regular documentation, but tend to be asked about on mailing lists.

That said, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the quality of results depends a lot on how the search is phrased and the topic being searched for, etc., so I could just be getting lucky.

I see, I guess I don't use my mobile devices enough to understand the pain points.

Hm, seems like a very good optimization (especially for an audience very likely to use it) to shorten !stackoverflow to something like !so

Really? I've been using it for a year and I've had no trouble finding anything on DDG. Sometimes if I'm looking up a very esoteric bug, I can generally get to where I need to be with a second opinion from Google, but 95% of my searches seem to do just fine with DDG.

> In 2006, I sold an Internet company that I had cofounded a few years earlier for millions of dollars.

It looks like that unnamed company was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_Database

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