Hacker News Reader

Comment by nr2x | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious what types of programming questions you can't get via DDG? I use it exclusively and very rarely have to look to Google (as in <1x month). Really the only time I revert to Google is if the issue is very fresh (eg some new iOS bug from the past 24hr). Also, you can prepend search with "!so" on DDG and go straight to Stack Overflow.

View on HN

It's pretty bad at stuff like symbols. Searching "c ++ operator" in DDG returns a bunch of "operators in C" results like [1]. On Google, the first two results are pages about increment and decrement operators.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operators_in_C_and_C%2B%2B

I can see how that can be confusing :p On Google I got the increment operator as the top result (though not specifically for C language). On DDG I got an equivalent result for fifth result. Second search result on Google which is the increment operator for C++ in C++ reference was probably the best result?

Personally for me, when I search something like this I tend to lookup the language reference directly and find the operator I want there since it's a very specific query with a very specific answer. But yeah, ddg, ecosia both fall short on this query.

Thanks, that's a helpful example, may be most of my programming questions don't involve C++. ;-)

I've used it exclusively for years without once looking to Google, which may well be better (I honestly wouldn't know) but DDG isn't a problem.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com