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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure DDG works great if you're an American. As someone who has tried a region specific version of DDG though, I can say the results are downright terrible.

Some say the DDG bangs are a solution. What do I win by doing that? It only made me resort to !g all the time, because the results were so bad.

Now I use https://www.startpage.com/ with region set to Swedish. It's practically a proxy for Google search, so it gives me the right results but sans the filter bubble experience (yes, I want the regional bubble). If you're a non US user, I can recommend it.

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I must say I'm having the reverse experience. I very seldom use its Danish regional setting, but even for Danish searches DDG is fine. It's only 4-5 times a month I need the !g bang. But knowing about Startpage, I now use the !sp bang instead of !g.

Indeed, due to the bangs, I know use DDG as my proxy to a lot of other search engines, like Wikipedia (!w/!wda/!w..) and Wiktionary (!wikt), and even obscure ones like Memory Alpha (!memoryalpha). Very handy indeed.

The wikipedia-in-certain-language bangs are very useful, indeed.

I've never found the bang functionality very useful. Perhaps because Chrome offers that out of the box in the URL bar.

Note you can access startpage results from DDG with the "!s" bang.

I rarely use region specific DDG, but when I do, I find it ok. With DDG I can manually enable/disable and switch the region, while Google guesses based on my IP - very annoying, given that I frequently use VPNs. (Of course, if you're logged in to Google, you can specify region/language/etc., but if you don't want to be tracked and delete their cookies or use the browser in private/porn/incognito mode, then it'll just assume that you are looking for Dutch things in the Netherlands, because that's where the VPN exit is...)

As Finn I rarely search for Finnish specific stuff. Sometimes I check prices or if something ships here or not, but that is exceedingly rare and for that DDG works fine.

As for bangs, I love skipping clicks. Most of the time I know what I want and can use bangs accordingly. I'm guessing my most common tags are !a, !yt, !gh, !wiki, !wolf and then some game(s) specific bangs.

Also big fan of skipping clicks.

BTW, for wikipedia, !w is enough. Wolfram Alpha is !wa.

I do agree with that. As I am from India I find myself hitting g! or actually opening google.co.in more often than I should but I am still trying DDG and will give it few weeks more.

StartPage doesn't seem to be helpful at all. It doesn't let me select language and region separately. I need to select English UK and then it sets my region as UK. Also, it's very slow (at least for me)

I never touch the DDG settings, but I often search in about a dozen different languages, and I get great results. The rare times I try to find something in another search engine, including Google, I get worse (or not better at best) results there, even for quite obscure topics, so I guess everything is user-specific.

As a German user, results have been good whenever I use regional search.

Using DDG with Swedish settings, I think results are ok. Of course, I'm usually seeking english results except when searching for swedish words.

If I set search to "Germany" in DDG the results are almost always what I want (to be fair, that's usually only shopping related).

Works great in Ireland. Although tbh 95% of my search is not for local stuff.

As an Australian, I don't get bad results with DDG.

DDG Seems pretty good for me in the UK.

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