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Comment by csdreamer7 | Hacker News Reader

I find that DDG is good for about 80% of what I want. But the other 20%, especially dev queries, I muscle memory type in !g.

Is there a bang for the type of query answer we are looking for?

Such as for 'Ruby gems' I can use !dev so the engine knows to ignore sites like Ruby Gemstone and focus on dev only.

I know there is !so and !gh, but I am looking for something that dynamically combines them and other dev resources as they fall in and out of search favor.

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I'm actually feeling google worse every day, I developed a way of searching by only typing important keywords. eg: "js unique array"

Now that's not working well anymore, google is ignoring 2 of 3 keywords to give me a general answer.

And even the search tricks, such as using "" don't work as before.

I think google is using far too much AI in the search is ruining it for me.

I may switch to something else soon.

The ignoring of keywords is annoying. Removing keyword in order to be able to get me a result is almost always the wrong thing to do. I end up clicking through a the first 3 to 4 links and wondering why on earth Google would think those sites was going to be helpful. The indication that a keyword was ignored to give me a result isn't clear enough.

Almost always, at least in my cases, removing keywords makes the resultat useless. I would rather have a blank page say "Sorry, no results".

While DuckDuckGo searches have clearly improved over time, Googles have become worse. I still think Google is better overall, but they're moving in the wrong direction.

I don't think I've ever had a keyword removal produce something worthwhile.

Perhaps there is a different class of user that this is useful for.

If only there was a way to disable it. Some sort of "advanced" mode.

> And even the search tricks, such as using "" don't work as before.

While it doesn't have quite the same effect [1] as the double quote marks, you could select the 'Verbatim' option [2] from the search tools menu.

[1] https://search.googleblog.com/2011/11/search-using-your-term...

[2] https://i.imgur.com/I7eL41i.png

I agree. A while back I pg (bad paraphrase) said it as "Google used to give you a list of right answers to your question. Now it's postmedernist search, where the true answer is true for you."

I think that about sums it up. Google got very good at personalising search. They got very good at answering questions with widgets on their pages, a reader's digest of the web.

They got worse at objective search.

I almost never find those small-scale sites with great content anymore.

I have a similar experience. I have developed a habit of attaching '-jquery' to every js-related search. DDG seems to respect this at all times while Google might just ignore this from time to time, leaving me with useless results.

I searched "js unique array" and got pretty much similar results in Google and DDG. I think a lot of times when Google skips a word is simply because there is no webpage with the literal query.

Yeah, but this example worked well for me too, but when it fails it drives me mad, and it will now add a subtitle saying it ignored a keyword allowing to click on it to add with double quotes, and then procedes to ignore the quotes in some results.

I think google is set to work for the majority of people and it's failing the way I use it.

Was searching for DDG contact. Found that there is a !dev bang, but all it does is search https://devdocs.io.

I am looking for something that I can signal to DDG to only/prefer dev sites.

If anyone is curious this is the site to look up your !bangs.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=dev

This is a really good idea. A Dev search engine! I hope someone will run with the idea, after all this is a start-up forum :)

A few months ago I was hacking some Java code (or a java DSL. Something I had never worked in before) and it had these bangs or at-marks in front of some keywords.

It was nearly impossible to search for what it did, since all search engines would ignore those in my query.

I do not know if I want a dev search engine.

I just want a way to signal DDG to prefer dev websites over nondev. DDG doesn't bubble us so it doesn't know I only want dev sites with certain queries and we keep naming projects after common terms. (Ruby, Python)

Thus !dev would be a good idea.

I guess it could be a good idea for dev.duckduckgo.com or duckduckgo.com/bangdev to be an option in search drop down, but honestly how often do people select alternative searches vs typing it in or !g'ing it?

What is !so and !gh? Can I use them on google?

Type ! in DDG and press down. You will see a list of accepted keywords. Those two search stackoverflow and github.

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