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Comment by 65827 | Hacker News Reader

I moved off of gmail a few months ago, pretty happy about that but man duckduckgo fucking suuuucks. Really wish there was a nonprofit (with a strong privacy policy) wikipedia like .org solution that provided good results.

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What problems are you running in to? I've been using duckduckgo at work for just over a year now (took a change of job as an ideal time to try a complete switch in search engine too), and it has been excellent. I've been getting almost as good results as I do from google on even from some fairly vague terms, and comparable to Google when I give it explicit text to search for. Unlike Google it also seems to pay a lot more attention to searching for what I'm asking for, instead of trying to play guessing games.

DDG does kinda suck at finding specific programming things sometimes. The results are just not as good for the more obscure and rare stuff.

This is because Google also tries to build a profile for you and serves different results based on that, while DDG will return the same thing for the same keywords to different people.

For searches in specific domains it is better to use bangs. For example prefixing with !py shows results from python manual.

Here's more about it: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I've found this to be true for Bing too. For general search, it matches Google in accuracy. But in the case when I want to find a specific compilation error, only Google gives me useful results. But I still use Bing, and switch to Google only for such stuff.

https://startpage.com (there are others) is a good way to get google results without directly feeding the beast.

I always search for things on duckduckgo and basically always find good enough results. I can only guess that everyone who thinks the results are bad has been using Google so much that they get really user-specific results that they like, despite the bubble.

Oh yeah it sucks. The main problem for me is the broken autocomplete. E.g. you want to search "Sydney Thai Restaurants"; you start typing "Sydney Thai res" and you click the first suggestion because duckduckgo is auto-completing the word "restaurants"... except now your search is "London Thai Restaurant".

https://imgur.com/a/V9I4o

the thing is, if you expect DevOps- and testing-related results to a cucumber chef query[0], the search provider really needs to keep a file on you. otherwise you're going to get pages and pages of salad, end of story. this was the nature of the loss of relevancy i saw in DDG results when i started using it several years ago. instead of complaining about it, i took it as a wakeup call to the severity of my google bubble problem.

[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=cucumber%20chef%20salad&sort=b...

Take a look at http://yacy.net. Though the 'good results' part is missing yet, due to (I believe) too few nodes.

Upd: and https://github.com/asciimoo/searx

What mail service are you using now?

Not OP but I recently switched to Fastmail myself. It's web interface is a bit bland but you can use IMAP/SMTP and your device's built in client if that's an issue

Liking it so far, really liking being able to attach my domains natively to my inbox

Not OP, but I switched to my domain provider's email service. I use IMAP on my phone and POP3 on my computer, so when I'm away I can sneak-peek via the phone, but when I'm at my computer I pop the messages and classify locally, which removes them from the server. The cheapest mail service out there is about $5/mo, but this way all I pay is the annual renewal about $10.

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