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Comment by ctnb | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad most a lot of these comments are saying DDG works for them; I still have a lot of issues with the search quality and switched to Startpage a while ago which uses anonymized google results.

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I'm with you. I switched to DDG, and within a day i started subconsciously adding `!g` to my query. And it's for simple things, not even complicated programming queries. For example, if i wanna see what the weather is, typing "Toronto weather" in google gives me the current weather right on the front page, whereas with DDG, i have to scan for weather network and click on it to actually get the information. Same goes for a TV show/movie/sports score. Google has Imdb rating/current live score right there on the home page.

"toronto weather" gives me the weather now and the 7 day forecast in a widget on the top of the search page. If I search "packers" it gives me the latest packers scores on the top (and if a game is ongoing an indicator of the time, who has the ball, and the score), if I search "patriots", there is an nfl tab on the top that I can click and it gives me the scores. I'm not saying you're wrong, but DDG has been working on some of those issues. You can always add !imdb or !rt in front of your shows/movies for rottentomatoes or imdb.

Hmm, you are right it shows correct weather now.

But here[0] are the examples of sport and movies/tv shows that i was talking about.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/vBWh6rN

For anyone reading this, you don't have to use g!. If you use s!, it'll go through StartPage, giving roughly the same results without actually using Google.

Only recently learned this from another HN commenter around here.

try:

"weather: toronto" instead

in my experience you don't need the ":" weather cityname is usually enough

For me it works well about 90% of the time, when it doesn't I hop over to Google for those specific queries.

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