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Comment by gary__ | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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