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Comment by ntkachov | Hacker News Reader

This is honestly why I use duckduckgo on any of my dev computers. They don't always have best results, but for stuff like java(script) not only do they have the !js/!java syntax for going straight to the docs but they also don't have over-seo'd websites cluttering up their results.

Edit: Also On DDG the same search would have been !js replace and you would have seen this page : https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=replace

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I actually prefer to not go straight to the docs because I find the Mozilla developer site to be somewhat slow (and occasionally really slow), and the search page to not be the greatest. So unless I get the name of what I'm looking up exactly right, there's just too much latency. I forget who taught me this (maybe on here), but when I google I just add a "MDN" to all my js searches and the specific Mozilla page for that topic is (usually) right at the top.

I guess it's kind of like a bang, and way better than having to write "site:developer.mozilla.org"

While I give credit for the Moz docs for being accurate.

They're not exactly the easiest things to browse or find what you're looking for. For webdevs they've got a load of stuff that you just don't care about.

I like DDG, but I'm finding it hard to break the Google habit.

I did just check out their settings area and it offers a lot of customisation which I love. I might just give it another (duck duck) go!

The trick is to always use DDG, but just add !g to search google when you're not satisfied (or !gi to search google images). You start to use google less and less after you get used to the DDG layout: At first it seems (for some reason) like you're getting less useful results on DDG - but after a while you can see you're getting pretty much the same results, in a different format!

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