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Comment by alexfromapex | Hacker News Reader

Someone needs to create a rival search engine to Google. I have tried switching but Bing and DuckDuckGo aren't anywhere near as good.

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I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for the last year or so; it's certainly improved a lot. Something that can help this transition is the bang support [0], with `!g` prefixed to your query. This redirects you to google with same query if you find that the results are not satisfactory. I used to use it a lot, but I've found I've needed it a lot less lately.

[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I recommend using `!s` instead, which will use Startpage instead of Google. But, since Startpage actually uses Google for search results in a private manner (similar to DDG using Bing and Oath/Yahoo), you'll get the same results as Google, but privately like DuckDuckGo.

Since !bangs are just using the URL search scheme of the site you're trying to search, it's just redirecting you to Google when you use !g, which allows Google to set cookies and use trackers. By using !g, one is sort of defeating the purpose of using DDG, so that's why I always like to recommend using Startpage and !s as a fallback instead.

Now is the best time too since Google is getting so terrible, not returning any decent websites for the search terms entered, ignoring keywords, returning what it thinks I want or what's good for google instead of returning what I'm looking for.

The market is ready for a new provider imo.

90% of the time I search something, I already know what website I'm looking for. For instance when I searched for "Monaco Grand Prix" a few minutes ago, I already knew the result I wanted was the wikipedia page about it. So instead of searching on google "Monaco Grand Prix wiki" I searched in the firefox address bar "wiki Monaco Grand Prix". Wiki is my search keyword for "search this on wikipedia".

By creating search keywords for my 5-10 most common sites to search things on, I have eliminated the majority of the searches I would have otherwise sent to a general purpose search engine.

Just to add, there are a few websites that have horrible search engines, like Reddit, so I do the same, but use my primary search engine's URL scheme specifying which site to limit the search to. For example, if I wanted to use "reddit" to have Google search Reddit instead of Reddit itself, I'd use something like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Areddit.com+%s

Of course, you can use any search engine you want, such as DDG. You just have to figure out the URL scheme for limiting the search to a specific domain and include it in the search URL when adding it to Firefox (or any other browser that lets you manually add search engines and keywords).

I'll take DDG's inferior results over Google's better results due to them tracking everything I do.

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