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Comment by danw3 | Hacker News Reader

I've just started using duckduckgo.com. Don't have any complaints so far.

I have but one, and it's that it consistently fails to find me what I need as well as Google does. I made a serious effort this week to use DuckDuckGo and made it my default search engine. I wasted so much time googling stuff I'd just DDG'd to find what I actually wanted. I love and support DDG fully, but Google still does search better, imo.

Apparently !g is a thing though? I may have to give that a try so I can have the benefits of DDG, but the results of google.

Yeah, I usually search with DDG and then add !g to it when I don't find anything good in my first search results

Well, !g will just redirect you to Google Search.

And I've noticed lately that DuckDuckGo has gotten much better at short queries lately, at the expense of longer queries. Any query over about 4 words goes straight to Google.

I use duckduckgo mainly, because I like what they are doing. From time to time I will get search results that aren't very relevant. In these cases, I just prepend '!google' to my search.

You can also use !sp to get Google results without Google tracking.

You can now also use !s which is the same as !sp.

Note that it works as either a prefix or a suffix - it might be easier to put the insertion point at the end of the text box.

If you're using Safari, you can use my Safari extension to do this with a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut: http://horizon-nigh.org/re-search/

Now that I've gotten used to them, I really like the !bang operators. They're incredibly convenient.

A few of the ones I abuse constantly:

!g - google

!bi - bing image

!yt - youtube

!so - stackoverflow

!w - wikipedia

!py - python docs

The exhaustive list is here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Didn't know you could just use '!g'. Very cool!

!images goes straight to google images.

Why are bangs good? Why not just go to the site?

Also Stackoverflow's search and many other site searches are totally rubbish. Not a bit, but totally rubbish. Here's an example:

"!so c# read file" => this delivers useless results, the top result being "Reading Excel files from C#"

Compare that to "stackoverflow c# read file" on google, which delivers what you actually want, with the question "Reading From a Text File in C#".

You don't have to load the site (trivial, but not negligible), throwing a bang in front of an already written search is simpler than rewriting the search, and google doesn't build a profile around you as another entity is doing the search.

another entity is doing the search.

What? It redirects your browser to Google, it's you doing the search, not any other entity. They don't proxy or anything.

He means that, for example, "!hn rust" would search hacker news directly for rust, whereas "hacker news rust" on google would do a similar job but via google, informing google of your search.

That's definitely not what his comment says. He's quite clearly talking about !g (not other bangs) and saying (incorrectly) that another entity (DDG) is doing the Google search so Google can't build a profile around you.

Sorry, ripdog and icebraining - I got it wrong. I hadn't played with ddg for a while and my memory was in error - I recalled !g returning google results in the ddg interface. My mistake.

I couldn't correct it because of HN's stupid 5-comment policy that applies to comments made in all threads combined, and couldn't edit the original comment with a correction as it had been more than an hour. :/

And if you search a programming term in DDG, it'll show you relevant results from SO in-line on the results page, which is pretty lovely.

> Why not just go to the site?

Setting DuckDuckGo as my default and using !s means I can search any of those sites without having to go to them first.

It takes a step out of the process.

I tried DDG for a while (a month, but probably a year ago now) but found I was always doing "!g <search terms>". So I just went back to using the address bar for searching and just the standard FF shortcuts (called "search engine keywords" IIRC) + a few extras I've added over the years.

On Firefox I have

g - google

ddg - duckduckgo

yt - youtube

w - wikipedia

etc.

easy to type without the bang at the front (Google and Wikipedia are defaults, not sure what the other ones are). I gather on DDG you can use them at the end so you need the ! as a delimiter.

you can use startpage if you want Google's results with none of the privacy leakage.

I wonder how they got that deal.

They pass your queries through a proxy, so you have to trust startpage, I guess.

No, I mean, I wonder how Startpage got a deal from Google to proxy their results. What's in it for Google?

A nice thing about these is that they work on Firefox Mobile if you sync it.

I tried to use duckduckgo too. but I gave up because google is a very integrated experience, it can search map and has gmail, google news. duckduckgo needs these additional services to really compete with google. openstreetmap isn't as powerful as google map.

That would defeat the purpose of their existence.

DuckDuckGo is cute but doesn't seem to offer anything in the way of competition. It seems very limited in the results it gets and doesn't come close to offering the features that the big guys offer. There really is nothing significantly better about it that I can think of.

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