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Comment by timlyo | Hacker News Reader

Can you recommend a search engine? I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good.

> I'm trying DuckDuckGo, but it's just not as good.

It took me a while of using DDG before I realized how much I had equated "good" with "looks like Google".

What finally hit me, hard, was that I switched the DDG theme to a color scheme designed to look like Google search results, and all of a sudden the results "felt better". Markedly better.

So, I started regularly comparing results, every time I found something that I felt I didn't get the results I expected for. I would search, and then search again with !g. And almost every time I ran into something that I didn't like the DDG results for, the Google results weren't actually any better. (The rare times they were, I reported that, and often it got fixed.)

!sp will give you the google results without the google tracking as it's a proxy of google results.

awesome, DDG rocks

just tried !spi and it works as image search :D

I use "!s" in DDG to get to Startpage [1] search results. One letter shorter to access the same - no need to type "!sp" when one can just type "!s" instead. :)

This does not work for replacing "!spi" (image search on Startpage) though. Using "!si" does a search on a non-existent subdomain sportsillustrated.cnn.com.

[1]: https://www.startpage.com

how'd you report to DDG? tried reporting that !gi does not utilizes encrypted.google.com (which I think it should), seems like no dice

I used the "Feedback" mechanism, and typically got a human response by email.

My problem is not the looks, whenever I use !g I'm annoyed how bad it looks. It IS the results. Often when something doesn't have a ton of relevant results, DDG gives the wrong results while !g has what I'm looking for.

In my experience ddg is less contextual. For instance when searching for something that is trending, Google will often give the most expected results even if the search keywords are incredibly vague, while ddg will give more standard results respecting the keywords.

That’s the very reason I switched to ddg, but it bites me back everytime I try to catch up on stuff everybody already knows for days, and need to fallback to !g.

Are you allow google to store cookies? Maybe its because of personalized search google does?

Oh, I'm pretty sure that's why. Unless encrypted.google.com doesn't use that information? Anyway, I'd love to have some way to personalize my DDG results and tell them what to boost. Alas.

Either "we doesn't gather your personal data" or personalization. These choices are mutually exclusive.

I always hit DDG first then if the results aren't great just append the Google bang (!g) in the DDG search field to get an unbubbled goog search.

The DDG bang system is one of its best features in my mind. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

How often do you end up at Google though; a few years back I tried DDG for a couple of months but ended up basically always doing !g and so went back to Google.

Might be time for another go?

It depends on what I'm searching for. If its an error code or something a bit esoteric around tech then google usually has better results, but for everyday topics the results are pretty decent, and they feel like they have improved over the years.

I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.

!sp for startpage is really nice to use if you want to have the Google results without the tracking. Edit: looks like this was already mentioned below. Whoops.

I use !s. Redirects it to Startpage instead. Google results, but it acts as a proxy.

On the homepage, https://www.startpage.com/, at the bottom it lists the security part a bit more.

I was in the same situation. Switched over again a few months back. I almost always only need to use !g for rare results (and even there it doesn't always help). On the other hand bangs like !mdn (mozilla developer network) and !w (wikipedia) make things much easier.

I use Firefox "awesomebar" keywords so "w" for Wikipedia, etc. (I think Chrome has this too), so I don't gain anything really with DDG's keywords on most searches.

For anything tech-related or everyday information DDG provides more reliable results than google because it's less infected by sales and SEO-spammers.

For local businesses and really rare topics Google is better.

I basically only use Google for movie listings, calculations, and restaurant hours now. The rare times I switch to Google for other searches DDG fails on, Google is no better.

I don't have any figures to back this up, but I feel like I use !g about half of the time (it may be 70 or 20% as well since I have no data). I'm not free from Google then, but this reduced my dependency by about 50%, which is still good to take !

I follow a three step model: 1. DDG 2. If that doesn't help, then use !s to search Startpage. 3. If that doesn't help, then use !g to search Google.

Other than the relevance and quality of search results, there are differences in features across these sites, like date range search, for example. Image search also seems to have more flexibility on Google. I haven't checked recently if reverse image search even exists on DDG or Startpage.

https://www.startpage.com gives you Google results but proxied.

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