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Comment by zaat | Hacker News Reader

My counter experience - after giving DDG a chance for more than two years, two days ago I replaced my default search browser to Google, and never looked back.

In my experience I had to add g! to 90% of my search to get useful results, except for the most trivial searches. It was so much so that I would often add one in the beginning and one at the end, resulting in my google query ending up as "search term g!".

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"Never looked back" is a bit hyperbolic for an action you took two days ago, isn't it?

It's a comic nod referring to the common description of the experience shared by the DDG converts

This fully coincides with my experience. Every once in a while, I hear about how much DDG has improved and how its results are now better than Google. I switch to DDG for a few days, get fed up with the (low) quality of the results, eventually start adding !g to all my queries because I _anticipate_ the results to be terrible, and at some point, I switch back to Google. Every single time I try DDG, this happens. Without exception.

I know not everyone shares my viewpoint but I wish people on reddit and HN would stop hyping up DDG. It will likely never be real competitor to Google. I don't mean to blame them in any way. Even Microsoft, with all their might, still fails to match Google's capabilities.

I was sort of in your boat, but is google really working out for you? It sure isn’t working out for me. I still use it out of familiarity and because DDG isn’t working either, but almost all the time that I want to find something that isn’t on Wikipedia or related to me buying something, I end up needing to do multiple search typically ending up doing something like site:these-are-all-the-bees-in-the-world.com because I was trying to identify the huge bee my cat almost ate, not trying to buy honey, or bee coloured dresses, or plush bees or bee branded diapers or whatever else.

Some of it isn’t Google’s fault or course, all the hobby stuff that happens in the blood bowl community group on Facebook never ends up in a search engine, but some of it is certainly Google’s fault. I’m just not sure how much privacy helps though, sure DDG might not try to sell me diapers because their advertisers might not know I have a two year old, but it still tries to sell me honey.

Google isn't really working for me either. I mean, it isn't the effective tool it used to be in the distant past.

Having saying that, yes, Google does work for me more than any of the alternatives and most of the times I can find even the most arcane and niche stuff I'm looking for, after investing few hours. Investing this level of efforts in DDG have never been fruitful and I have given up long ago trying anything but the most trivial stuff.

You just said you where using g! constantly. As someone that never had that issue I can only assume you simply never learned how to use DDG.

For example, it’s not using your location behind the scenes so “restaurants near me” doesn’t work. But swap to say “restaurants near ZIPCODE” and it’s fine.

I bring this up because oddly enough I had the opposite problem yesterday. When using a friends phone I just couldn’t find what I was looking for until I swapped from Google to DDG. From 15 useless queries to first try third result.

No, I have no issue or interest with finding restaurants near me. I'm talking about researching stuff, finding solutions to technical issues, old manuals, stuff that is a little bit more challenging than the basics. I used g! constantly because most of the times the results for non trivial stuff are worthless

Yet, I and many others can find solutions to technical issues easily on DDG. Hell that’s what I was trying to find on Google and failed.

If it’s a frequent issue for you perhaps you could provide some examples? I only ask because I hear people agreeing with you and yet I have never seen an actual example.

One recent example - for some reason I had to find a bunch of RPM packages for i386 arch from RHEL/CentOS 5 era. I'm not talking about the easy stuff that I could find on old mirrors or rpmfind, though even those would rarely show up on ddg, but the more obscure ones, which I could never find without google.

i switched to a self-hosted searx instance and it was way better than ddg for me, although i do still have to switch to google in very rare cases

This does look interesting. I might give it a shot sometime soon

The problem with self-hosting your own instance that you are only using is that Google can still make a profile for you based on your search history.

I still have DDG as default but almost always add !g on my queries, it's such an instinct I am regularly adding it when I have my secondary browser open with google search.

Try !s instead for startpage. For my searches, I tend to find more with a DDG and Startpage search versus DDG and Google.

I use DDG as my main search engine since a year or two, and I add !g for 90% of my technical searches, but for everything else it's more like 10% or less.

I switched to DDG in 2013 or before, and been on it since. This is very true for technical searches, I actually set my work machine's default engine to Startpage.com for that reason. I don't always remember to check other engines when I'm focused on something, so SP (anonymous Google results) bumped off DDG for me there.

On my machine, it's the !bangs that keep me hooked. I realize the results aren't quite as good as Google's, but it's usually just the top few results that seem to be key ones missing from DDG. I'm really surprised at the lack of popularity of SP, it's been my Google reference for a long time now.

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