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Comment by davidhollander | Hacker News Reader

> for search that was significantly better than google

Why aren't you using Duck Duck Go? [ http://duckduckgo.com/ ]

It's 10 times faster than Google to find stuff if you're a programmer, you can just press J, K like it was VIM and just focus your eyes on the green box to scan like 100 webpages instantly.

It's even faster if you don't use Chromium but a browser with a sane and configurable BACK button (ex. Opera ex. BACKSPACE) instead of moveyour-hand + ALT + ARROW nonsense.

Set homepage to DuckDuckGo and just press backspace with pinky to get back to entering a new search. IMO even if you want to end up at a google service like Google News it's faster, ex. "!news wikileaks"

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Really? I don't feel this way at all.

As a long time user of google and someone who has given DDG a significant 'chance' I am still using google as my default search.

Part of the reason is information density; I make a search on google and just instantly get more on the screen, and probably because I am so used to google i absorb that information much more quickly. I look at DDG and my brain hurts just a tiny bit trying to parse it all.. not sure how to explain it exactly. But as someone who really is into the idea of a search engine made for power users / programmers.. ddg just wasn't doing it for me.

Re keyboard shortcuts: this is not a selling point for me, nor should it be for any power user. It is trivial to map backspace to the back button in any leading browser. I personally use 'b' for back, 'j' for down, 'k' for up.

Well it's a completely different cognitive heuristic. Duck Duck Go the heuristic is continuous rapid scanning. For Google: send, receive, digest.

I believe the brain tends to only evaluate around 7+/-2 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_... ) chunks at a time for each comparison anyway so I prefer the minimalism of Duck Duck Go. Which displays 7-9 results in my visual field at the default zoom level. But I agree my original claims were perhaps a bit hyperbolic and there is definitely a role for consumer preference in the search engine market.

I think perhaps we can agree Google is perhaps a bit too rigid in only offering it's single namesake search prompt and should provide further variations of its core product to cater to a variety of heuristics for visual processing of information.

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