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Comment by thecrumb | Hacker News Reader

Duck.Duck.Go.

Is it just me or has anyone else noticed that, in the last several months, DDG's top search results have been getting much better? I almost always find the most relevant links at the top of the first page, and when directly comparing their results to Google's, DDG results may be in a slightly different order but they are still really close.

DDG has been improving a lot over the past few months, though IMO it's still far from perfect. It also still lacks the math and conversion tools from google ("19 gigabit / 10000 milliseconds in TBit/s")

That didn't work for me :( Google have already indexed your comment though!

Looks like you have to spell out the whole word terabit, or abbreviate it to Tb.

Sometimes google is a bit fiddly with the exact formatting but they usually get it eventually. I would love a feature like that in DDG.

I prefix those queries with !wa. It's fairly slow, but it does much better unit conversions than Google and the scale comparisons are usually fun and often useful.

I recommend https://wolframalpha.com as a replacement for those types of queries. It’s even better than Google for that.

I agree that they are getting better, and glad that in my experience they are not the same. DDG is better for evergreen topics, Google seems to overvalue local / recent now.

Nice to hear about this. The last time I tried to switch, two or three years ago, the results (a lot of dev related stuff) were really not very good. I'll try it again.

I made DuckDuckGo my browser's default search engine a few years ago out of principle, but I would switch to Google very quickly because it was still so much better.

In the last few months I noticed it had become incredibly good as well, so I've mostly stopped using Google search. (Now looking for a privacy-focused competitor to Gmail and Google Maps, and a phone that can run the Android OS without any spyware, bloatware, or planned obsolescence).

~85% of my searches on DDG are great (and improving), and the !bang syntax handles the rest; usually "the rest" are esoteric items. I see no reason to use anyone else as a primary search engine anymore.

May give them another shot... I intended to try them for a month a couple years ago (left after about 2 weeks, well short of a full month). The results were so much worse for me than google. Having some insight into the usage details they get from analytics cannot be underestimated.

Indeed, the reasons to dump Google just keep on mounting. A pet peeve of mine is how they keep making harder and harder to tell what's actual search results and what's google ads. For this reason I actually prefer duckduckgo.com/lite. Check it out, great contrast on ads.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to use this as default search engine on Firefox. Has anyone solved this?

duckduck.com isn't owned by DDG. Don't shorten a URL, people will think it's real, I tried it. :(

duckduckgo.com/lite has WONDERFUL ad highlighting, this is what I think should be the legal minimum for it. Not just for transparency, but for safety and security.

Google continues to allow advertisers to display a fake URL on the search page, but actually send you somewhere else, leading to things like this, last week: http://www.zdnet.com/article/scammers-tricked-google-into-po...

> duckduck.com isn't owned by DDG. Don't shorten a URL, people will think it's real, I tried it. :(

Sorry, typo. Fixed it.

> duckduckgo.com/lite has WONDERFUL ad highlighting

Yes. Have you figured out if it can be used as default search engine on Firefox? I haven't been able to... And I'm not talking about a "bookmark keyword", I managed to get that to work.

I haven't tried to. I just was commenting on having visited it upon your recommendation. :)

I can't remember if I've just done this on all my browsers a long time ago or what, but if you go to the main web page for duckduckgo.com, and click on the icon that shows up on the bottom of the page, you should be taken to a sort of slideshow about how wonderful DDG is, which should have a big "Add DuckDuckGo to Firefox" on it. That will make it appear as a search provider you can get to via the normal search configuration.

> Unfortunately I haven't been able to use this as default search engine on Firefox. Has anyone solved this?

https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-lite/ ?

I have tried this in the past and didn't work. I would just land on the duckduckgo.com/lite blank page, with no search results. And I have also try it right now and can't even install (I'm assuming it's because Firefox recently moved to version 59.0)

works here, tried it before suggesting it :/

How strange. Well, thanks for the info.

Just noticed that it only works when searching for single words, not for multiple. That might be it.

I just tried that and for me neither works.

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