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Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

How many of you are using it as your default search engine? I am. I don't think it's as good as Google, but I think it's good enough, some things are useful, like the quick links, and at least the user interface is cleaner, there is no stupid auto-complete etc.

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I did for a while and loved the bang searches like everyone else, but I missed the speed of Google searches -- so I eventually went back.

Yes, it's a relatively silly quibble, but that second or two more of loading feels pretty significant.

It's not silly at all, and we're working on that.

I do for now, but its match failures (especially on computers-related stuff) is making me consider switching back to google more every day. Match results really are much lower quality than on google.

> there is no stupid auto-complete

That's really something I don't care about, since I never search directly from the site, always from my browser.

Same here. I have it set as my primary search engine for months how but recently noticed that I am more often than not already add the !s or !g to get Google results instead when entering my terms in the address bar.

One of my biggest gripes is probably that it will only display one result per domain unless you restrict a search solely to that domain. And it often shows not the most relevant or logical result for a query for a website. I should make notes on that and send them in.

Please do send in specific examples -- we really do use them to make a lot of improvements.

When DDG fails, use !g followed by your query. It takes you straight to the Google results. Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).

> Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).

Since it mostly uses Y!S's results, which tend to suck compared to google's (for my searches anyway), I'm not sure it can improve much in that area, which is by far the one that pains me the most.

And if I'm going to use google 9 times out of 10, I can just remove the indirection.

I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10. They don't mostly use Y! results from what I've heard from Gabriel. They do their own crawling and ranking too, so I do expect results to improve. They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.

0-click info and search ideas are really nice features. Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.

> I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10.

You say what you want, I say what I did.

> They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.

It's cool, but I've not seen it helping much so far, since the base results suck ridding them of some of the crap don't improve them noticeably.

> 0-click info and search ideas are really nice features.

They're nice features when they display information I want. They generally don't.

> Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.

No. Just no. Firefox has been able to do that since 0.9 if not earlier, I'm sure other web browsers can handle that as well. I have no need whatsoever for the indirection through DDG. Here's how I search amazon: focus address bar, type "a somethingsomething", return.

I've been using it as my default search engine for a couple of months now, and it's been great. The only thing I find myself missing from Google is image search.

What really makes DuckDuckGo so great is the bang syntax. Searching for '!foo bar' will automatically redirect you to another search engine for your search (e.g. '!cpan mechanize'). Here are a few I use frequently: !google - Google !images - Google Images !cpan - Perl CPAN !perldoc - The Perldocs

Duck Duck Go makes it so easy to search everything.

!google and !images also exist as !g and !i. Additionally, if you're concerned with privacy (as I assume you are, if you use DDG), then I can recommend !scroogle (or !s).

I do. What I like about it is the ability to use j, k (just like in Vim!) to navigate and that results are displayed on a single page. English searches are good enough to replace Google (at least for me), but I still use Google for other languages.

I have! DuckDuckGo gives me fewer hits, but I am usually able to find what I'm looking for within the first few hits, which is great.

One observation is that the Duck is great for English language / international searches but not for other languages (such as Dutch) searches.

I have switched inside the Google Chrome bar and am able to access image searches by adding a "!images" inside the search or Google with a !g. Very little inconvenience there.

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