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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

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!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

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.

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.

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