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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Rant seems extremely strong - how about we go with well thought through set of opinions that the CEO of Duck Duck Go is rigorously applying to his product.

I personally found his argument so persuasive I intend to set everything to DuckDuckGo again now.

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I made the switch to DDG about 12 months ago for all devices. It has been an entirely positive experience.

Went to try it for a week to see if it was viable. Haven't looked back and have never needed to go to Google's search engine for a year now. Best feature is by far the Stack Overflow 'instant answers'!

I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.

Same. I use Firefox for Android which is helpful if you have searches you know for a fact DDG won't be able to figure because Firefox let's you select a different search engine instead from the bottom. I do this for sports and location specific searches.

It’s usually good enough for me 90-95% and if I need something that google does better I’ll just use !sp as a proxy to those results. !g is a last resort.

When I moved to DDG, it took me more than a week to tune my searches for it. I was completely trained to the google interpreter and ddg works different. Now I use slightly different phrases, or ordering and it is great. I only use !g for very specific technical searches, like obscure errors.

Do you have some hints on effectively using DDG, based on that experience?

I would also find this interesting, I switched from DDG to StartPage.com (proxied Google results) for this reason.

Just use it. There are no special tricks or hints needed, it is that good.

Biggest differences to me is that Google seems to handle natural questions like "how do i..." in a "smart" way whereas ddg seems to be more altavista like in that your keywords have higher weight rather than trying to outsmart you. Another difference is that Google is much better on local search thanks to its strong bonds with Google maps, like checking opening hours. For anything not maps related DDG has been my default for can't even remember how many years, over 5.

If you want to directly search other sites without having to choose a different engine in Firefox: if you search through DDG, you can put !g before or after your query and it’ll forward you to google.

There are a bunch of these. !a forwards to Amazon, !w to Wikipedia, etc.

Try !s instead of !g for startpage. Same results, less tracking.

Similar results. Sometimes the Google bubble helps.

But I agree. I check on DuckDuckGo, if I can't find what I'm looking for, most of the time, adding !s finds it. If not, I go back and switching to !g.

> I have it as my primary search engine now too, but I find myself constantly using !g because the results suck.

It's the opposite for me. I use primarily google, but when the results suck (which is quite often), I switch to duckduckgo to obtain a sensible search.

When a DDG search has results that seem unsatisfactory then just do a follow up Google bang with !g

Often with technical searches the DDG results seem better.

The "just" in having to analyze some results and come to the conclusion that I need to rerun the query with some prefix is not so convincing. I've already wasted time at that point.

You still have to analyze results anyway. Or do you only take the first result that Google provides?

As to rerun the query, that's what the back button is for. Simply hit back, add your bang and enter. Most browsers keep that page in cache so going back is pretty quick.

That probably helps them improve. If I were at DDG I would look at these queries and try to improve the results to match Google.

Been full DDG almost as long and now I can't go back. It gives me much better results than google does.

Quora is not a forum for product placement. The CEO ad was not answering the question.

Quora is a good place for product placement and is commonly used as such. In fact, I believe that’s Quora’s revenue generation model...

Hang on, do you think Quora is being paid to allow such answers, or that they allow them because controversial answers are popular ?

Whether or not companies are paying Quora, it's common for startup founders to answer questions there.

Sometimes the posts are blatant ads that don't really answer the question, or they add nothing that was not already answered. But sometimes they do answer the question and provide value, while also subtly pointing to a product. I think the latter is acceptable, and I do it occasionally myself. (Example: https://www.quora.com/What-kinds-of-lights-are-best-to-comba...)

Consider this: founders have the strongest conviction for solving a given problem. They often created a product because they saw a gap in the market, and they tend to be domain experts. So, they are highly qualified to answer questions within their area of expertise.

If a post provides value and just so happens to offer a relevant solution with financial strings attached, I have absolutely no problem with it. I might even end up purchasing it, because by searching or asking questions on Quora, I am looking for a solution myself.

Agreed.

I've assumed one can pay to pin answers to the top, but according to https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-business-model-of-Quora-Ho... that is falsified.

The amount of misinformation I see on Quora is staggering; product placement like this is better than the average content, to be honest.

It wasn't always this way. Quora's user base expanded heavily and the quality of content suffered. When the community was smaller questions and answers were more informative. Its slowly becoming a glorified Yahoo answers.

I've been using it for years (how many years I can't quite recall, but at least 4 or 5). Haven't looked back. If I really need Google results, I can always stick "!g " in front of the search.

You can stick !g or any of those at almost every place in the query. In fact, if it is at the end you can omit the space.

Yep. I always forget that, though, so I stick to the beginning as a force of habit.

I made the switch on all my devices about 6 weeks ago. I lasted 5 weeks. At least for quickly finding relevant programming documentation, I didn't think the results were on par with Google.

If you still want to support DuckDuckGo, you might want to use a browser that lets you prefix search quesies with a one or two letter combo for the search engine to use. Chrome and Vivaldi have this feature and I think Firefox does as well, although I exclusively use its search bar instead, so I am not completely sure.

You can use the g! prefix and it will go to Google. I found DDG plenty good enough for my use case, and in the rare case I can't find it there I just use g! and bam.

I thought “g!” as opposed to “!g” was a typo, but TIL both ways work equally fine! Thanks!

Bang commands are such a wonderful feature on DDG. Not just for searching other engines when the DDG results aren't what I'm looking for but also for ecommerce sites. The frontpage of most sites are extremely heavyweight and you have to go through a ton of garbage just to get to a search box. Being able to add !homedepot to a DDG search and have it send me to the search results page at Home Depot and not the DDG spidering of the site is pretty nifty feature. I do most of my searches of shopping sites that way now.

I often use the other ones to go directly to the search I want: !imdb, !w (wikipedia), !rt (rotten tomatoes), etc.

Yeah, I'm convinced now, too

I can’t get over ther branding. I know this is a terrible reason for not switching but I can’t stand their name or logo. If they were named something more modern and less annoying I’d consider. Call me shallow but branding is important if I’m going to use it every day.

It’s a duck with a bow tie. It’s adorable. Are you not human?

It looks like Disney's original version of Donald Duck. Knowing how Disney influenced copyright law doesn't help in liking the character.

I guess I am not. Something about a duck in a bow tie doesn’t sit well with me.

Branding is easily the hardest part of a new project. Code is easy. Names are hard!

it isn't the reason I don't DDG (or is it?) ..but I had a similar reaction to the branding.

How about something more like CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet?

Better.

To be fair, "Google" is pretty silly sounding too, in a vacuum. . .But yes, DDG isn't a great name, and it put me off using it in college.

While I use DDG as my default search engine I also never got the name.. I think the logo is fine but the name is beyond me.

...what? Did you never play duck-duck-go(/ose) as a child?

Funny. In Germany this game has a very different name (something like 'The fox goes round'). It didn't even occur to me that it could be that.

edit: And I still do not understand the relation to a search engine :)

As a kid I played duck-duck-goose. I don't think I originally made the connection to that either when I saw the slightly shorter name duck-duck-go.

I short while ago, I was surprised to find my tech-illiterate family members and friends using DuckDuckGo without me having the privacy talk with them (many of them cited that they feel Google has finally crossed the line).

The thing is that people (including those who don't use DDG) remember "the goofy-looking duck". DuckDuckGo would be extremely foolish to throw away the mind share they built so far.

Besides, for whatever it's worth, I happen to like the name and logo. I think it's very memorable and has character unlike generic startup name #13.

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