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Comment by webo | Hacker News Reader

I can’t tell if everyone here is serious when they say they haven’t looked back.

Google knowledge graph is years ahead of DDG. Average person does not want to click through results, s/he just wants the answer. Compare these queries in Google vs. ddg:

  - nba scores
  - 2018 super bowl
  - lakers roster
  - movies in theatres
  - game of thrones cast
  - $aapl
  - where is my phone
  - 2019 thanksgiving

etc

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I can't say I haven't looked back; occasionally I'll fall back to Google when DDG is having trouble finding what I want to find. Even then, it's certainly less than 10% of the time (maybe even less than 5%), and I find when I have to do that, Google's results aren't super high quality either (though most of the time the quality is just better enough that it turned out to be useful to have the Google fallback).

As for just "getting the answer", I suspect you're right most of the time, but I really don't mind clicking through the first few results links to see the answer. Figuring out the best answer and putting it in-line with the search results is a nice-to-have for me, but certainly not essential.

Also note that I'm making a trade-off here: lower search result quality in return for not having my search history tracked. For many people, I imagine they don't care about their privacy as much and will make the opposite trade-off. That's fine; I'm just glad we have good enough options so people can make that decision and not be forced one way or the other.

If you want to help break a monopoly, you'll have to bear with not having all the features only a monopoly can provide.

Scrolling a bit or even clicking on "More results" is not that big of an inconvenience for me to completely drop them. I will admit though that when a search fails for me, I may at times check the same search query at Google, but I now use Google for like 10% of my searches or so.

Personally I find that Google is great for "social knowledge" like the examples above, but for work related troubleshooting/documentation/error codes/etc duck duck go brings me better results.

If I'm searching for a place to eat near my house I use google, if I'm searching for WSUS error code 0X8024401C I use DDG

Perhaps the average person is not on hacker news.

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