Comment by cisstrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cisstrd | Hacker News Reader

Is there a really good in-depth up-to-date comparison somewhere between duckduckgo and google?

For example: I don't see any advantage in those search bangs, simply searching "shoes amazon" on google will do the job, or if I really want to search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com", and considering all the other things google can do...

duckduckgo might do some of those things, some of those even well, but I don't know, therefore the question about a detailed comparison... in google:

search literally by using quotation marks "to be or not to be", show weather, stocks, definitions, times, calculate anything, you can even do stuff like "notebook 200$..300$" which searches in that specific price range, currency and number conversion, exclude some search terms, flight information and lots more... whenever I read of something about supposedly awesome duckduckgo-features, it seems like the author(s) don't know a lot about google's capabilities... or I guess don't mention it on purpose. Many don't know about google's capabilities I guess, and then they might go "look what duckduckgo can do", ehm "google has been capable of that for x years"...

and by the way: last I checked google was immensely superior in search term results (even without the bubbling effect)

simply searching "shoes amazon" will do the job, or if I really want to search a specific site one can easily do "shoes site: amazon.com"

The search bangs take you directly to the search implementation of the site in question. Sometimes this is preferred to a Google search. If you try "!amazon shoes" on DDG and "amazon shoes" on Google, you can see the difference. Basically, in any case where you would type something into a site's search box (instead of Google's), it saves you a click or from having to navigate to that site first.

Oh I see... just tried it, k, can see why some like that feature, I actually think it's something a search engine isn't supposed to do, but ok, thanks for the hint :)

@neurobuddha has also been blogging about specific !bangs which is even more enlightening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11773901 (his post is currently buried below, but he totally deserves all the karma!)

or just "!a" for amazon.

Where google has lost me is on country detection. It's virtually impossible to change country context.

NCR feature disappeared, and even choosing a specific language for the search results won't prevent some results from one's country to bubble up at the top (i.e. if I am in France, setting the interface in english and asking results for 'any region' will still boost french results)

It's just huge PITA to search for resources in a global context, which is the majority of my searches. DDG is a lot more sensible and manageable in this respect.

Websites that choose display language based on IP address is the bane of my existence and google is the absolute worst site for doing this. I used to use ncr constantly for any google related task. I don't trust google enough any more to log in and set language preferences - I only allow their web properties to store session cookies when needed. The best I can do with google is to write a dumb greasemonkey script to add 'hl=en' to any google URLs.

Oh nice, I agree... normally I don't have the problem since I pretty much constantly use VPN-Servers in english-speaking locations, but whenever I don't or are on another machine it's somewhat "weird" and frustrating. Valid criticism.

So I guess from their part it's a feature, user-friendliness, they have to serve the layman and the professional. If one uses a Google Account, you probably can tweak this with some settings?

> NCR feature disappeared

Have you tried using it again? I kept forgetting that it was gone, until one day it started working again.

There was this old thread with an alternative way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10791018

I tried both but it seems still dead (or t's because I'm on mobile ?).

To be honest I don't think it will either come back. There is such a long trend of getting rid of generic searches that it seems that Google has a very natural incentive to do so.

I wouldn't be surprised that providing non localized search results has a very high cost (be it in performance, ad results or any other metric) on Google's side. It must feel logical in their position to reduce that cost to a minimum.

I frequently use !js which searches only the JavaScript portion of the Mozilla Developer Network.

You can also always use the Google search results - without being profiled - by using !g (aka, best of both worlds)

The advantage over Google is that DuckDuckGo is private.

https://duckduckgo.com/privacy

> it seems like the author(s) don't know a lot about google's capabilities

It seems to me Google is determined to keep its features a secret from users. Why isn't there an easy to use and easy to find advanced search screen?

But, let's say you want to look at images of shoes. If you google "shoe images", it brings you to the main search page for images, you have to click over to "Images" results.

if you DDG for: "!gi shoe images", it will automatically do this for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com