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Comment by dest | Hacker News Reader

As a search provider, DuckDuckGo tries to prevent the "gated community" syndrom: http://dontbubble.us/

Yeah, too bad it fails at some searches and falling back to google is needed

For controversial stuff, the bubble is definitely a minus. For factual queries, it just makes things easier (yes, when I type 'python' I don't mean the reptile)

How does it fail for you?

I persisted and find that although the results are different, they are often just different. Once I became used to DDG it's started to seem like Google is the broken one.

It did take a while for me to switch, maybe 3 tries before it was working right.

- Autocomplete gives "funny" (non-relevant) suggestions

- Queries need more grooming to get to relevant results (search for things in Dublin, get results for Ireland/Ohio/California mixed)

One of my really lazy really common searches is the module codes at my university. It's really nice that Google know which university I mean and always get it right even if I've never searched that code before.

If they're at your university are the results you're looking for not all under the same domain? I would have expected site:university.com to return the right results for you. (Okay, perhaps it's not the every-man solution.)

Yep, that'd work - it does make the query considerably longer than the 5 character code though. Like I said, very lazy search.

It would be better if they would have visible button next to search input field that would let you to decide if you want to be in bubble or not.

I tried their test of googling for "guns" as usual, in incognito mode and using another browser. Identical results. Dunno if I'm doing it wrong?

If you're not into guns, it probably won't make any difference.

Ah that might be it. I tried 'singularity' and there was a slight difference.

Same results and I'm way too much into guns.

It just might mean that they saw through your "It's not me, it's someone else" charade.

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