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Comment by TheAceOfHearts | Hacker News Reader

I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube

Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.

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I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.

Same experience here.

Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...

Same experience. I switched 4 years ago, and the search results that I'm interested in were as good or better than google.

Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.

DDG used to be worse but now it's about even. Every time I get bad results on DDG and use !g I find equally bad results.

Can't agree. Almost always when DDG has only spam or useless results, !g gives me exactly what I looked for. I like DDG, especially the bangs, but Google still gives me way better results when I need them.

Out of curiosity, what are some examples? You can also submit feedback directly in the results, which the DDG team uses to improve their algorithms.

IIRC most commonly it's coding related stuff.

Just had an extremely horrendous example. Searching for "webpack 3" the first link doesn't mention "webpack" at all, only packweb and generally it's an absolutely useless result page.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22webpack+3%22&atb=v49-4&ia=web

Can you screenshot your results please, because mine are all webpack related.

https://imgur.com/a/oMWBC

But yeah, saw that I had south africa enabled. Still makes little sense but explains a bit why the result is so weird.

I'm using Android with Chrome, and there is no option to change the search engine to DDG :/

The only options are: Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, Ask.

If you go to ddg in chrome they provide a link that will add ddg as a search provider.

It works, thanks!

I have been looking to do the same, but so far no luck.

See comment above for a fix.

The sad thing is that AOL & Yahoo is really Bing, and Ask is I believe Google. So essentially it comes down to Google and Bing.

To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF.

I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,

DDG actually was using Yahoo as a serach provider and now uses Yandex. The ads on DDG are from the Yahoo network.

> AOL & Yahoo is really Bing What? I don't get that -- I don't know about AOL, but I thought that Yahoo does its own crawling (their Slurp bot)

They used to. That changed like 8 years ago. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Search

AOL has Bing in the footer, Yahoo had Bing references in the source view when I checked, although it looks like what tallanvor said and they just return mix of search engines.

Yahoo was using Bing from around 2010 to 2015. But since then they've been using a variety of sources - Bing, Google, and presumably their own, and I think it can mix the results.

Yahoo's search business was always odd... They had their own search, then switched to search powered by Google. Then they purchased Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Overture had originally purchased AlltheWeb from FAST, who had pivoted into the enterprise space, and later got bought by Microsoft and integrated into SharePoint.

Try Samsung internet. It has ddg by default. Also you can install ad blockers for it from the play store.

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