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Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

My relationship with DDG for the last few years has been the following:

- I read somewhere (mostly always on HN) how great it is.

- I set it as the main search engine on my browser.

- I use it for a while, but I notice how slow it feels compared to Google, and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

- I go back to Google after a few days, and I forget about DDG for a few months/years, at least until the next comment on HN about it.

...and the cycle begins, again.

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Yep, this has happened to me. DDG simply doesn't give me the results I want and expect I would get on Google, I can only stand a few days of using it before I go back.

I'm guessing it has to be the (what I once thought was subtle, but apparently is not) positive effect that Google promises it will deliver due to building a profile of me personally and returning different results based on what it knows about me.

> and how the results (especially local, non US ones) are somehow off in some cases.

For local results, DDG sucks by default. Google, when I enter something local or German, has great results, DDG only if I flip the local switch to "Germany". But besides that I prefer their results for most things besides rare searches (if there are under 100 results, DDG is almost useless). But bangs make it preferable to me even then.

I had a similar experience, and it took me a while to realize how much of my "this feels off" feeling was correlated to the appearance of the search results. I changed the DDG theme to match Google's appearance, and that feeling of "this feels off" evaporated.

How do you do that? I've switched to DDG, but for some reason the search results page doesn't feel like search results.

Switch your theme from "Default" to "Basic".

(After spending a while with "Basic" to convince myself the results were just as good and I just had a trained reaction to the visual style, I went back to Default. And after a while, now Google results seem subtly off.)

Thanks!

It looks like my mind over-fitted on blue title/green url/black pull-text as the code for a web search result hit.

You probably know about but with DDG you can add a !g to the search query to get results from Google. So I keep DDG as default and then sometimes I retry with a !g query.

Sometimes for programming related questions DDG does a better job I noticed.

Note you can also do !s for a slightly less Big Brother version of Google’s results (not personalized, not tracked):

https://www.startpage.com/

https://www.startpage.com/eng/protect-privacy.html

I wonder what the easiest method would be for all of us to share screen shots of these results that we say are good at engine X and bad at Engine Y.

I see many people say results from [whatever] are bad - but not enough info to know if they are tech people who 99% search for debian docs and uber eats... and or other people who say [other] are good / bad.. we need to start posting examples. If there were some way to use the firefox screen capture and share tool for example, to upload good / bad searches, i'd love to see how others see things.

I really want to make new search engine options, and want to show examples of the others and how they could be done better. Crowd sources examples of good and bad would be a benefit to many.

I tend to find DDG to be comparable for most day-to-day searches. "Electricians in <home town>" or "Restaurants near <sports arena>" work great and is where they'd want to focus to attract market share. I have no problems with it being the default on my phone because of this.

Where I run into trouble is on anything technical. Trying to find research or technical references is a hopeless cause and Google is still my work computer default.

Same thing. I think the information Google has about me ends up leading to better search results. I want DDG to work, but the results are never as good.

The key to switching from Google to DDG is memorizing a few shortcuts for fallbacks, like "!g" (Google), "!gi" (Google images), and "!gn" (Google news). It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters, but over time you'll find yourself using them less and less. They will never completely disappear, but one day you'll realize you're only using them in a few percent of your searches. In most cases, you will know in advance that you specifically want "Google results" instead of "search results," and can add them on the first query.

From a privacy perspective, using DDG like this denies Google 95+% of the information it would be gathering about you.

Caveat: I have never wanted "local" or "personalized" search results. I'm willing to type "Chinese food near ZIP code" or "Chinese translation" instead of relying on opaque algorithms to use my location and personal data to decide whether I'm hungry or confused.

For me it was exactly the opposite: It ended becoming an automatism, I used the flag 100% of the time, by default without looking at the ddg results.

That's when I switched back to Google.

> It can be annoying at first to have to type the few extra characters,

Especially on mobile. Can't they use something more mobile-friendly than "!g", such as "gg" or "/g" for example?

Better idea: place a "Google" button after the (say) third search result.

If not done universally, allow me to activate this feature in my preferences.

I tried DDG a few times but always switched back to Google eventually (typing <BACK> and then <SPACE> "!g" <ENTER> is tiring, especially on mobile). I think this option would make me switch to DDG indefinitely.

I just came up with the idea to make a bookmarklet, which converts the current DDG search into Google:

    javascript:(function(){ var s = document.location.search.split("&")[0].substr(1); document.location = "https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&"+s; })();

It's not perfect, but it's a start :)

To be clear: while this button directs people away from DDG to Google, it actually allows people to use DDG as their first (main) search engine, and lets them switch to Google if necessary without much inconvenience. The better the DDG search results, the less views they lose to Google.

Nice idea! However, I still struggle to see the advantage over "!g".

The workflow is exactly the same: Search for stuff in DDG, and if you suspect that Google might have returned a better result, prepend "!g " to your query (which might be even faster than clicking on the bookmarklet, depending on how fast you type).

I imagine the whole idea is that they don't obviously advertise a way to use a competing service...

BTW, you can also search through StartPage instead by using !sp, or Bing, etc so there's nice flexibility there.

DDG is useful if you're american. I'm canadian and the results are mostly crap.

Canadian. DDG is better for me now, stayin' with it.

If you want to stay in your bubble, Google is probably better (getting local results or results that are related to your search history), but personally, I don't like that, most of the time.

If the results aren't good enough on DDG, I just use the "g!" to search on google via DDG. I'm guessing a good 40% of what I'm looking for ends up on a Google search - mainly because I suck at using the right keywords.

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