Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?

29 pointsdustinty58 comments

DuckDuckGo. I went back and forth between DDG and Google a number of times before I managed to stick with DDG. I rarely go to Google at this point, only in cases where the search is extremely specific and it really needs Google’s omnipresent eye. DDG’s results have gotten a lot better in the last year or so and the !bangs are super handy.

Meanwhile Google is experimenting tirelessly with AI that ‘corrects’ my searches, pushes mentally draining and content starved hype sites to the top and redirects me to buggy AMP versions of sites that were fine previously.

I use DuckDuckGo because of infinite scrolling and the ability to navigate your search results with the up/down arrows. It's not privacy, but usability. It's insane that these features aren't built into every search engine.

Also I agree that Google is outsmarting itself in terms of guessing what users want. It used to be you could learn how to coax Google into giving good results, but its queries feel way less expressive these days because they're trying to be smart.

I'm better at learning the behavior of a stupid search engine than a smart search engine is at learning my behavior (for now at least).

I still use Google Scholar a lot though.

> Meanwhile Google is experimenting tirelessly with AI that ‘corrects’ my searches, pushes mentally draining and content starved hype sites to the top and redirects me to buggy AMP versions of sites that were fine previously.

I have been back and forth between Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing for this precise reason. I don't want my search engine to outsmart me, or to think that I am interested in the most recent result instead of the most relevant, or... a bunch of other similar stuff where Google is the worst offender. Recently I have used DDG more because I have the feeling it just does what I tell it to do, not what it thinks I'm trying to get at.

I agree with your assessment of the failings of google, but I wonder if this kind of growing pains are a requisite of moving to AI for search? Some issues are caused by profit motive, but it seems like AI search has a higher ceiling of excellence than older methods. In a few years, they may pass up the competition in a way that others can't easily replicate.

I was using DDG on iPhone to escape Googel AMP pages, but now both !g and !ge take me to www.google.com instead of encrypted.google.com.

Hopefully someone from DDG will see this because I have no clue where to send feedback.

encrypted.google.com is being deprecated by Google.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/7631341?p=encryp...

Google because I need the best results in the least amount of time. I’ve tried switching to DuckDuckGo and I just find myself using the !g way too much to justify the switch.

Unfortunately, I think your results will be heavily skewed in a place like Hacker News, which may or may not be what you want.

So far, half of the replies are about DuckDuckGo, which doesn't even account for 0.1% of all searches globally.

Personally, I've switched to DDG about 2 weeks ago and it's been pretty much seamless. This depends mostly on what I search for; if it's something very specific, Google will provide better results. However, a lot of the time I simply search for standalone topics that do not require a lot of context, like 'Japan GDP' or 'blue shark'. In these cases, DDG is just as good as Google, given that you simply open the first result anyway.

I'd love to see more people switch to DDG, but most people simply don't care or are not tech savvy enough to understand how much tracking Google does.

Most people don't know that there are other options. Even among those, most people choose Google because they believe it's good and because they're are used to it. Google being the default search engine in many browser deployments across platforms and countries also cements its position further among the common crowd.

Even for HN, this discussion will probably be biased, anyway : if you use an underdog like DDG, you probably are more willing to let people know about that than if you use plain old google search.

That being said, a discussion about searching habits is always interesting. Eg, comment from user "NewEntryHN" is both unexpected and an interesting point of view.

I believe this isn't wasn't intended to be a broad survey representative of the population, but one for the hn audience in case there might now be something better than DDG/Bing/Google.

I mostly use DDG but !bing seems to work better with code, and !gi seems more comprehensive with images (plus, I trust Google to being better with images...)

Saerx.me because it uses other search engines add a proxy, giving me the privacy I desire. Also, I live in China where, arguably, the best engine is blocked. Searx.me also gives me access to it without firing up a VPN.

Google.

I've tried to use DDG several times in the past, and while the product works well, Google has the "familiarity effect" baked into its search. I've been conditioned for nearly two decades by Google's layout and visual cues. At a moment when I'm uncertain of something and am searching for an answer, the last thing I want is to be uncertain/unfamiliar with the search tool itself. Those stacking of anxieties, however small, is why I think people continue to use Google.

This probably may not help, but I'm just putting it here so that anyone reading this may benefit from it. If you use Firefox, there's an extension called Stylish [1] that lets you change the look of any site (Stylish is to CSS what GreaseMonkey is to JavaScript). The site userstyles.org has community contributed styles for many sites. Here's the list for all the themes available to style DDG. [2] There are even styles for a multi-column result page.

This can only change the look of the site by using the content on the page, but cannot provide missing features. Whether that's a UX improvement or not will depend on the style and the user.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/

[2]: https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=duckduckgo

I had exactly the same problem when I tried to move to DDG. The 'Basic' theme looks quite similar to Google's search results. After trying DDG with this theme I was able to make the switch stick.

DuckDuckGo and Google, although I barely use any search engine.

I use Firefox search keywords to emulate DuckDuckGo's bangs (and much more), download, browse and search documentation on disk when possible, and use the location bar's immediate search on history and bookmarks to its extreme. I notice people have no idea how faster it is to actually wait half a second for the suggestions on bookmarks/history to load and quickly skim them and find what you're searching, although it only works if your history dates back to 7 years and you basically have half the web in your Firefox history.

When I really need a search engine, my algorithm is the following: do I just want the link to a specific site/page I'm thinking about? Yes -> DuckDuckGo. No -> Google.

DuckDuckGo, but half the time I use the "bang" keywords to specifically use another site. I like the simple page layout, that they don't track people and that it does what I ask without trying to guess what I really mean. I don't know how it compares to Google, but most of the time I find what I want in the first page of links, so it's good enough for me.

My biggest complaint is that it doesn't index many forums and mailing lists, so it can be difficult to find answers for really specific questions. It does look at StackOverflow, but there's a number of communities (Linux users, some niche language developers, etc.) that don't use StackOverflow much. In that case I'll often use "!g" to get Google results.

Searx because its good in both local results and in other categories. I feel like Google has been focusing too much on local results and so their other results are kind of odd now, they don't make sense anymore. With Searx I get a mix of everything, its perfect for me. Right now I use searx.me but I've been looking around to see if its the fastest instance. There's a page where they sort all searx instances by ping (can't find it on mobile). Maybe I'll run my own public instance one day. Would be a nice project if not too costly.

Google because it works. I don't remember last time I had to visit the second page to find something. Also it's fast, and obviously well integrated to Google Chrome.

DuckDuckGo because I get good results and also because I want to give them more data so that they will have a better chance at staying competitive.

DuckDuckGo about 60% of the time, followed by StartPage and Google. The main reason for choosing DDG is privacy. And it's the same for StartPage too. I never search on Google when logged in, and I try to isolate browser activities in different ways (on Firefox, I clear cookies with Cookie AutoDelete, use Containers, etc.).

I usually start my searches on DDG, and move on by modifying the same search query with a !s prefix (for StartPage) or a !g prefix (for Google). DuckDuckGo's date search is comparatively limited. DDG still isn't adequate for me for tech related searches, though it's gotten better over time (StartPage, which is a proxy for Google, and Google itself, are much better). Image search also has more refinement options on Google than on the other two.

I also use DDG to search Wikipedia (!w prefix) and IMDB (!imdb prefix, which is a bit long to type though).

DDG has a bang search keyword for almost every site you may want to search on. [1]

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Duckduckgo, because I don't memorize rarely used git commands/language and/or library features, and so when I search for how to do something, it gives me the answer instantaneously without having to wade through stackOverflow pages. I use Google rarely for very specific things(like to check the date a TV show's latest episode is going to air)

duckduckgo because i love of the bangs !gh !npm !yt !gm but also !g sometimes.

For those who might assume that setting up custom browser searches is the same as using DuckDuckGo's !bangs - it isn't.

DDG's bangs work across multiple browsers (provided that DDG is the default browser), and it takes less time to just do that than to set up thousands of custom searches. It's much faster than using the site: suffix too.

For example, the Arch Linux wiki is simply !arch <search term> and naturally, !hn, !reddit and !twitter (or !tw) are also covered.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I've been going back and forth between DDG and Google for almost two years. When I first started using DDG it wasn't great. It'd often be missing what you'd want or have worse results than Google. Over time it has improved dramatically while Google's quality has declined.

Today DDG is on par with Google. My biggest complain is that they both have bad results for many searches. I don't necessarily fault them since search is a Hard Problem.

One thing they both do that's quite annoying is prioritizing ecommerce results over original source product pages. For example, if you search for a specific product you'll often get Amazon as the top result rather than the manufacturer's site.

DuckDuckGo, because it gives me the answers I seek (if I'm not satisfied, I'll throw in a !g, but the efficacy of that has declined over the past years, as DDG has improved). The one exception is Google Scholar, which is still unmatched.

Google scholar is indeed amazingly useful, but oddly enough for me DDG is what makes it easy to use. I have no clue how to get the scholar results from the google page. If I'm honest I don't even know how to access google scholar without using DDG, although I imagine I could probably figure it out if it ever became necessary.

Google on PC, DDG on the phone.

I use an extension on Firefox to be able to view images directly and reverse search images on Google Images since they removed that feature.

None of those extensions worked for Firefox Android, so I've just made DDG my main search engine there.

What's the name of this extension?

It's Make Google Images Great Again.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-google-i...

I use StartPage as my primary. If I don't see results I want, I'll fall back to encrypted Google. If you're looking for more alternative search engines, PrivacyTools.io is what got me onto StartPage

Sorry the 'encrypted' qualification for Google gave me a slight smile since G uses this 'private' information more than anyone else would.

Google, because when it comes to localized (aka non-US) content every other search engine pretty much sucks. That's why in Europe Google dominates the market with market share in search north of 90%.

Polish guy living in Chile, using DDG as a main search for something like 2 years ago now. on the occasion (once every week maybe?) I switch to Google (!g + search) if DDG doesn't give me good result, but with Google recently almost every time I have to switch to verbatim mode as normal one returns garbage... rest od the searches are rather ok, but I'm mostly searching in English and Spanish. in the latter case I sometimes have to force local results (toggle in the search pageof DDG) as it returns results from different Latin countries.

I used Yahoo! in the earliest days. Then I tried HOTBOT. Then it was Altavista, and it’s Raging derivative as soon as it launched in 2000 or thereabouts. I’ve used Google almost exclusively since 2001.

Does anyone know how searx gets around the Google captchas that trigger after too many searches at once (or by using a shared VPN). IP Rotation maybe?

I've mostly switched to DDG. Google gives much better results in some cases but for the vast majority of my searches DDG works fine.

!DuckDuckGo, switched from Google in 2013. In beginning I was !g a lot but now never. What I prefer is the straight-forward results, same results for everybody, instant answers, etc. And the fact they open source a lot (looked to contribute but ugh. failed, even i like Perl)

My default is DDG, but I append !g so often that I am practically using Google at this point.

Google.

Results are far more relevant than DDG or Bing.

And I trust Google more than Microsoft to keep my data secure.

Do you mean by intent, competence or both?

startpage.com as a proxy for Google results.

Duckduckgo. It's good enough now, I am slowly moving away from Google products (only Gmail left). Rarely, I will use !g to go to Google but it has gotten lesser and lesser recently.

DuckDuckGo has become the search engine of choice. Again I agree that HN is the type of audience that will skew the results, but personally I have DDG a more than capable search engine.

duckduckgo w/ Firefox for personal things, and Chrome+Google for tech.

I find the duckduckgo search results for tech problems far inferior for some reason.

I use Google. Too many times I'm searching for something so specific that even Google doesn't return a full page of results.

Google. Inertia and "good enough" SERPs.

Usually DDG. It's improved in the past year or so; I find myself falling back onto Google less and less frequently.

Mostly Google. I am yet to find a search engine that gives better results for technical queries. Google just works.

Bing, because it's good enough and it's not the Google monoculture.

well, certainly not DDG, since it's blocked in Iran. :/

I used DuckDuckGo for years: it's really nice.

Since December 2017 I am using Qwant: it just works.

I am using them because I want to keep the Internet interesting and full of variety. For me internet is more than google and facebook.

all of them because i want to spread the wealth

startpage.com (Google proxy)

searx, because I can use google, bing, ddg and startpage in one go.

Bing because google is evil.

When I started becoming a bit more privacy-conscious, a couple of years ago, I started using uMatrix. I used it, amongst other things, to disable javascript. I thought DDG didn't work with javascript disabled (then I realized I had mis-configured uMatrix) and because of that I used Bing for 1yr+.

It's actually quite good. Very rarely I need Google.

After I managed to get DDG working without JS, I moved to DDG. Also quite good.

I think Google is no longer miles ahead of the competition, and I suspect hasn't been in a while.

Bing or DDG for me

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