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Comment by Nebbers | Hacker News Reader

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'!

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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.

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