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Comment by mattculbreth | Hacker News Reader

Well you gotta try DuckDuckGo: http://duckduckgo.com/?t=mattc58

I've switched to it for most of my ad hoc searching. Occasionally I use Google still for some things.

I also though have 4 separate google accounts for email, which I can't really get away from. Well I guess I could but I probably won't for a while.

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Seconding this. DDG is awesome. The zero-click info is often very nice, I love the keyboard shortcuts (though there's a google keyboard shortcuts experiment), and !bang[1] is really awesome. There's a bunch of other occasionally-useful goodies[2]. It'll do disambiguation if you search something with many meanings (eg. Ruby). Infinite pagination.

I switched a month or 2 ago, and I've been very happy. And if I search for something and don't like the results, I hit / (the keyboard shortcut to select the text of the search box), hit right-arrow (to get my cursor to the end of the search box), add a "!g" to the end, and hit enter. And then I usually find that google's results are just as bad :)

1: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

2: http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html

!bang is the most useful search feature since I'm Feeling Lucky. I submitted this exact feature to Google years ago, and DuckDuckGo's implementation of it caused me to switch search engines.

Thx! Note that we've had I'm Feeling Ducky through !bang for a while (!+space+sarch), but the last few days I've made it even easier.

You can now do /+search, e.g. /slashdot or whatever. Also all the !bang commands now will take you right to the site if you don't follow them with a search, e.g. !a takes you to amazon.

Nice work, as usual, Gabriel.

Meh. I don't see the point of using !amazon, for instance, when I already have a search in firefox for the same thing. Just 'o a foo' (as I'm using vimperator) and I'm on amazon.

Or just set a shortcut key to a search box (e.g., a for amazon's search), and you can shorten that to 'a foo'.

DuckDuckGo certainly does the trick for general web search, but like you I'm really tied in to Gmail/Talk/Reader for my personal life and Google Apps for Business for my work life. Unfortunately, replacing these isn't entirely up to me at this point and I imagine a lot of people are in this boat.

The only thing keeping me on gmail right now is the spam filter, which seems to be the best on the planet. Can anyone recommend an alternative filter?

(been using DDG for search for about 6 months now, rarely if ever get better results on google)

Do you really get that much spam? I've had the same email address since 1990, I use it pretty much everywhere, and I get maybe 10 spam emails a day, with no filters.

I find that extremely hard to believe. Do you have some very anomalous usage patterns, such as never using that address to register on websites, and never having it posted anywhere spider-crawlable on the Internet?

I'd wager that an address that is bot-scrapable would soon see dozens of spam messages a day, if not much more.

I tried DDG for awhile, an honestly found the search results to be lacking compared to Google. YMMV.

Seconded, plus if you do ever need to use Google, try http://scroogle.org or http://ixquick.com instead. Both anonymously scrape results from Google and don't keep records.

I use DuckDuckGo for pretty much all my day to day searching. Sometimes if I'm looking for a very specific page I still use Google - but just sticking !g on the end of your search makes that very easy.

What is the ?t=mattc58 good for in the URL? Just curious.

A fun hack he put it to make a leaderboard of people who talk about DDG. It's at http://duckduckgo.com/spread.html.

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