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Comment by Jenz | Hacker News Reader

When DuckDuckGo doesn’t cut it, which IME is not often, then Google is always easily available with !g query

My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

This being said DDG was able to take over 99.99% of my searching needs for some time now. And when I have some query that doesn't seem to return anything useful on DDG it turns out Google doesn't really do much better (YMMV).

I still use Youtube and Google Maps heavily compared to alternative services. But for everything else I decided to "spread the joy" and not rely on a single provider of services.

> My biggest gripe with DDG is that if I search for a business, even when using the exact name, it will almost surely come back with a couple Yelp results (which is like getting a link to a 2005 MySpace page) followed by a dozen Facebook profiles that vaguely resemble the name of the business I was searching for.

I've had this same experience. Looking up businesses is pretty much the only time I use Google.

or Startpage with !sp. or Bing with !b.

Amazon is !a, etc. etc.

DDG has some neat functionality via bangs (aka !): https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I’ve been positively suprised many times, guessing for these bangs as well, very often they tend to be exactly as one would expect, even for sites in my own native language: norwegian, there are bangs for the more niche sites as well.

When I want to look something up in the norwegian Wikipedia I do !wno, for english just !w or !wen (and if I for some reason unbeknownst would want search in another language, it would be just a language tag away), I was very happy to see bangs for both the online norwegian dictionaries I use (!naob and !norsk), and some of the nicher sites, though, maybe not quite so niche here in HN: !dfw (Dwarf Fortress Wiki), even !nhw (nethack), etc.

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