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Comment by iandanforth | Hacker News Reader

Edit - Chrome only issue for which the devs don't have good options.

I was very disappointed to discover that the app forces you to use DDG for search. In Chrome there doesn't appear to be a way to use Google as your default search engine while the extension is active. I like its other features but Google search IMO is much much better than DDG and don't want to be forced to switch.

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This is unfortunately the way Chrome works right now. If you revert search settings they disable the whole extension. We are actively trying to find a way around this behavior.

Is there a way to get the website rating functionality without being forced to use DDG as a default search provider?

I don't think so in Chrome, no, though we are actively trying to find a way short of forking the extension, and if anyone has any ideas, please feel free to reach out to me.

However, we do suggest generally to switch browsers if privacy is a primary concern. We recommend and use ourselves a number of good browsers: Firefox, Safari, Brave, and Vivaldi among them.

Yuk. Thanks for all the hard work and keep at it!

Immediately uninstalled because of exactly this. The "We rate websites on privacy" value proposition didn't quite mention "(and we will force you to use our search without asking)".

I guess that decision was made because you can use Google Search with DDG. Just add "!g " in front of your search query.

That does not justify this in my view. "It's easy for users to change their search habits to get the same experience they had before, so let's just change the default search for them".

Just to add to the other comments already addressing the !g option: I use DuckDuckGo exclusively but I almost never use it's actual search results as a Google replacement for precisely this reason. It's just that I use !w, !imdb, !m, !n, !ups & friends so often, than it's worth it to just prefix my search with !g when I do want traditional web search. But now I've stopped using Google as a shortcut to get to what I already know I'm looking for but don't want to type the full address. I really just use DuckDuckGo results when I do want the privacy especially.

One of the advantages of DDG over other search engines is that with only a few keystrokes you can search anywhere you like.

!g blah will search google, !gi will search google images, !rdoc will search the Ruby documentation.

DDG even allows users to add their own search prefixes. !mmls Margaret Atwood searches my local library system for the books by that author.

You can uncheck that option in extension settings at least in Safari.

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