Hacker News Reader

Comment by colejohnson66 | Hacker News Reader

If you want Google’s results, but on DDG, the GP mentioned that you should prepend your query with “!g”

This just redirects you to google.com with the search term entered. No different than searching on Google.

doesn't this take you to google instead of ddg(bing)? am I missing something?

Thanks, but then I'd have to prepend all my queries with that. And sure, maybe not all queries need it, but I don't want to have to search two times either. I just want good results on the first try.

I appreciate everyone who uses DDG, and perhaps that's the route I would go if I couldn't use my userscript. But I greatly prefer my setup.

Hey, whatever works for you :) Google is better, but that’s partly because of all the tracking they do.

It depends on how you use it. Whenever Google gets my search wrong I usually end up clicking a bunch of results anyway, cause even though they're not what I was looking for there's a good chance they still look interesting. But then when I try to fix my search to get to what I'm actually looking for Google just spams me with more results related to the links I clicked :(

Google was very good (arguably better) in the era before they acquired Doubleclick.

You don’t, only for free text type searches. A majority of my searches are other !foo searches, like !w Napoleon to find wiki info on the topic, same for YouTube, Python docs, different dictionaries and thesauruses. You learn to use these, just like you learn to use any other tool.

DDG as a search engine really does suck, but as a ui for other engines it's excellent. I like it on my phone in particular because I can pull things up faster and save data by not going to multiple pages for specific searches. Examples:

!s - start page, a google proxy !yt - youtube search !w - wikipedia etc.

Almost all I use I just figured out because it's obvious. !az = amazon, !ebay = ebay, etc. Usually just guessing gets me there 90% of the time, and then I can learn to use it again.

But again, that's just my workflow, not for everyone if you don't care if you use google for 99% of your searches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com