Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

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> Not sure if this is just me,

It is not, many people are saying this.

Personally I find other search engines (DDG included) quite impossible to use, the results just are not what I was looking for, while Google is an always first page hit. Engines like Bing just give me straight up crap which isn't even related to (seemingly ofcourse; it somehow did find a relation obviously) what I am searching for.

I use web search almost exclusively for compile issues, coding searches and whitepaper searches. I would like to use something else but it would be very inefficient for the work I do at this moment.

What I noticed as well (and is sommewhat related); I work in China a lot and my colleagues there have no (real; they have it when they need to but they don't use it like we do) access to Google and, when solving hardware/software problems they are far less efficient than us. Thye have an advantage (I find) that they memorize a lot more than we do, but when we just need to solve something that they did not encounter before, Google always delivers while Baidu, Bing etc do not even get close.

Even if you often use Google search, you should switch the default to DDG and make the Google search command explicit so that Google isn't always "listening" to everything you type into the URL text field. Otherwise, even when you think you are just entering the complete URL and not doing a search, you might be sending it character by character to Google as you enter it. A Google employee I know warned me years ago that they were always studying what you typed, including keystroke timing, accuracy, backspaces, everything including what URLs you were going to without needing a search, to see how much they could learn about you, even when you weren't (knowingly) doing a Google search.

You could just turn off autosuggest, but then unintended items (ex: typos, things that don't match the browser's "complete URL" regex pattern) would still be sent to Google. Best to not make Big Brother your default listener in the first place.

Or you know use a browser respects your privacy, I don’t trust chrome isn’t sending my data to google even after changing my default. Its really handy that the same browser keeps the search and url bars separate so the intent it never mixed, which is really handy if you’re not working with public sites with FQDNs all the the time.

I rarely notice a difference in quality between Google and DDG; usually DDG's widgets are more useful (stack overflow snippets, etc), and Google's search seems slightly better at using context to pick the right idea behind some overloaded search term. For example, if I search "nix provision", I want results about provisioning a system with Nix, and Google does this correctly while the top results for DDG are "Congress nixes provision..." and "Virginia may nix key provision..." and "provisioning a nix node"; DDG isn't far off--the correct results are still on the first page, and this query is understandably challenging, but Google seems to know that if I'm searching for "nix" and "provision", it should prefer entries for which those terms are significant. In other words, the words "nix" and "provision" are very significant in articles about provisioning with nix; they're not* very significant in articles about trimming legislation.

That said, I still prefer DDG because much of my searching is code, DDG seems less likely to snoop, and Google's handling of the Google Memo seemed sufficiently authoritarian to make me prefer suitable rival products where available.

It is interesting, because does not match to my experience. Can you give an example of your search query that does not work well enough on DDG?

My username => amorphid

I want 'amorphid', not 'amorphis'.

I just searched with quotes around the word and it worked.

+amorphid

works. More tips under "duckduckgo search syntax".

This said, I think google is more accurate. But duckduckgo works well enough and is my default search engine now (Google lost me with THE ONE GOOGLE aggregation since quite a while ago)

I'm still frustrated that Google took away using pluses in searches so they could try to recreate AOL keywords for Google Plus.

Quotes work wonders. For many search engines including google knowing the syntax for more advanced searches is key.

DuckDuckGo even informs you of their changed query under the assumption of a spelling mistake, and offers to search, in quotes, exactly what you typed instead. Right at the top of the page.

Ugh, the worst part is that it bolds the word you didn't look up.

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