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Comment by nebulous1 | Hacker News Reader

Alright, I'm going to give it another go. Tried a few years back and ended up !g to the end of almost every search

I liked all the other functionality a lot, but the results themselves just didn't work for me.

I find that duckduckgo is more easily tricked by SEO compared to google when it comes to long searches. Other than that I use it exclusively. After a few months of use I've gotten to a point that I subconsciously know which searches will need a g! before I even search them( I've confirmed this multiple times as well).

Can you give a few examples of those?

The last one I can find from my history is this:

I was looking for a company developing intraocular lenses that are better than a healthy human one but I couldn't remember the company's name. My search was

artificial lenses better than human

Google gave me the company name on it's 3rd result description but duckduckgo gave me irrelevant stuff all the way down. That was yesterday. Today duckduckgo gives me the company name on the description of the second result. So it's pretty volatile I guess.

I've noticed recently that there are already sites trying to game DDG and their results show up among first for some obscure searches, but nowhere else. I guess that's price for popularity.

Its a sign that DDG's search traffic has value, which is a great change from just a few years ago.

I tried to use DuckDuckGo, but even still I feel its results are not up to par with Google, despite Google's results sliding in quality year after year. Qwant has been a decent supplement, the results for general queries are good and on the more specific ones (part numbers, key terms from papers and articles) its equal to or better than Yahoo/Bing.

On specific queries, Google has really dropped the ball. Part numbers get ignored or rewritten, and results are just plain missing (despite other search engines having those key results).

You could write a very helpful blog post about this.

You think? Maybe I should look into how to make a blog since it has been in my mind for a long time but I'm not into the IT industry in any extend so I don't know how to do it. I'll keep tabs on my searches for a few days to see what I actually search with google or duckduckgo.

Why does google allow !g? They are competitors after all?

Edit, ok, I see it redirects the user to Google.com

Because it's traffic they can serve ads to. Why wouldn't they? It's 100% win for them. They're getting someone who is dissatisfied with another search engine to try and win them over

It's a win, but not a wash, because they cannot serve highly targeted ads, which means they probably can't charge as much and people are less likely to click on.

Try to create a separate google account, use browser profiles, and this particular account only for searches in a specialized field (say CS, IT etc...). Than start looking at the ads you're getting. Google can't do that if the request comes from ddg.

It doesn't proxy the request to google, it issues a redirect to google and your browser does the request, with all its cookies.

So what's the point of using ddg instead of google if you do this?

It's just a quick way for the user to also try Google. I usually do search in DDG (default search) if I don't get good results I append !g to get results. Most often though Google doesn't give me much better results.

Lack of certain information is a valuable data point. Privacy-conscious searchers are served by many small but profitable niche industries.

Well, it just redirects you to google, so google can serve you ads etc

A better question is why they allow startpage.com (a.k.a. !s). I think at this point, fighting scrapers is just not worth it. But I predict one day someone is going to write a client-side desktop app that scrapes all this stuff and presents it AOL-style, it'll get popular, and all the sites will freak.

This isn't really any different than StartPage. What I find a good search-flow is that instead of doing a !g [search] I just use !sp [search], instead. That way you don't land on Google for the search at all but you get the entire list of results and StartPage has a better stance on privacy.

Regarding DDG on general, I've been using it exclusively as my first search provider and it has ramped in quality searches at a nice clip. I find myself bouncing through to the above search-flow less and less over time and I'm now in the process of deGoogling other things.

Keep donating to those privacy focused services where you can! DDG is a prime example of showing how these services can exist without an agenda, other than customer oriented features.

> Keep donating to those privacy focused services where you can!

As good a moment as any to publicly express gratitude to the donations DDG has provide to us (Terms of Service; Didn't Read) and several other privacy-focused projects, which has been of great help.

All of the bang commands are probably a great way for them to get feedback on what they're not giving good results from. Very targeted training data.

One thing that helped me: switch to the "Basic" theme, which makes the search results look like Google's. It's remarkable how much can make the same results seem better. I spent a while with this theme when first switching, and it helped me realize just how much I'd mentally associated "good results" with "looks like Google results".

They have improved a lot over the past couple of years, I use it as my engine of choice these days. For really obscure problems, the results on Google are still better, but about 99 percent of time, DuckDuckGo is en par with Google by now.

Same.

I use https://www.startpage.com/ as fallback when duckduckgo fails, because it gives the same results as Google. You can use searchstring !sp in Duckduckgo, to switch to Startpage.

...and you can use Bing as a backup to DuckDuckGo, because there is a search provider agreement in place with Microsoft.

The results between Bing and DuckDuckGo are usually identical, but I haven't checked in a few months. I wonder if the metacharacters work the same on both sites.

It's also nice that Startpage finally stopped blocking Tor browser. I use it much more now.

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