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Comment by appleshore | Hacker News Reader

If there were viable alternatives, people would shift over time.

If I type in “<name> Pentagon” on Google, the first link is LinkedIn. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even list it at all. There’s countless examples where DuckDuckGo just can’t find basic information. DDG is just unreliable beyond it’s silly name.

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I'm always confused by this. I have ddg as the default on my home computer and Google is the default on my work. So I'm constantly using both. There aren't really any apparent differences to me in results. I'm not sure what everyone else is searching, but I search everything from how to spell a word that I should definitely know all the way to niche topics in physics.

Maybe it's because I don't have tracking enabled in Google (I'm not logged into my account when at work) and opt out of tracking where I can. Maybe this is the difference between the lack of difference I see and the huge difference so many others see. But I still don't see it as an issue because I generally find what I'm looking for with one search. Might be the third item, but that's not an issue to me.

I hear this so often that I assume something has to be different. I'm curious if others have ideas as to what it might be, or if I correctly identified them.

I use DDG as my default everywhere, and when I don't find something, I'll !g it as a bit of a last resort.

I'd estimate I'm doing that maybe 5% of the time. It seems to be even odds that I find a satisfying match, though, obviously those are all the hard queries.

The hardest queries are trying to dig up details about stories in the news.

I try to use and like DDG, but the results just aren't as good. For example, it seems to be completely unaware of Docker Hub. Like, pages from that entire subdomain never show up. I can search "Docker hub" and it doesn't even show up.

I agree, unfortunately the search is really really sub-par and like others said, frequently doesn’t find basic things no matter how specific the keywords I use are.

I feel it might have even been better at one stage ?

For that specifically, use !dhub or !dockerhub to search the site directly. Really, the magic of DDG is bang queries.

(Search for bang queries with, not surprisingly, "!bang".)

usually I just do !g and that solves the problem ;-)

But also, thank you. I didn't realise there were so many bangs.

Unless you're searching in Russian, DDG is mostly a skin for Bing search results anyways. The major players in the search engine space are Google, Bing/MSN, Yandex, and Baidu - with the latter two being mostly language-specific.

I find DDG has pretty acceptable or even good results most of the time.

The real power is in the "bangs", though; you can use the `!` to immediately jump to the first search result without seeing a search page, or use `!g` to switch to Google for this particular query, among others. It enables a sort of power-user usage that one wouldn't get with Google.

I don’t really get the logic, just use a good search engine in the first place ?

The !bang feature I use the most is !w for wikipedia, however I don't use wikipedia enough to justify making it my default search engine on the nav bar.

Your browser can assign keywords to custom search engines so you could just type "wiki blah" to see Wikipedia or "jira 123" to load a specific ticket.

I'm saying that DDG can be "good enough", and that not having to click around on a results page can save you time if you know what you're doing.

I understand that for some people that's not enough of a time savings to make a difference, but I know DDG well enough to be able to `!` things and almost always immediately get to a successful result. I treat it as an extension of my brain at this point.

It's for when the good search engine is the site's own page.

If I'm working on python and numpy and I want to look up `argsort`, I know I want to search the numpy page, so !numpy argsort takes me right there.

Any kind of web dev is !mdn whatever and I don't have to scroll through a dozen BS tutorials, I just get the specs.

The logic is when you made DDG your default search for the address bar. Then it becomes the zero-stop jump off point for all the other search engines they have !bang syntax for (which are thousands, I think).

I used to configure those as search keywords in Firefox (and before, Opera), which do roughly the same without the exclamation point. But on a new browser, even just configuring your favourite top 5 searches is a lot of hassle compared to just setting DDG as the default search and using their bangs.

What does a viable alternative look like?

I've been using Bing for the past few months; it's not great or terrible but is it "viable" enough for people to shift to over time? Or is it not viable because it's backed by a major corporation?

I'm sure there are search quirks with each engine but I've seen issues with Google too and yet it's the "devil we know" ... so people unconsciously work around them.

I've used Bing for years now. The only time I go back to Google is if I'm searching for something super specific (normally programming related). Bing takes care of most of my search needs.

I wonder if this is due to google possibly ignoring the robot.txt and Bing (which powers DDG) accepting Linkedin's request? https://www.linkedin.com/robots.txt

I've been using DDG almost exclusively & find it's results to be better than Google's with the exception of local businesses & maps. Google still has an advantage there.

Neither DDG or Google return any LinkedIn results for me unless I also add LinkedIn to the search, in which case I get the same results for both search engines.

Google knows what you want before you even ask. You might find that convenient, I find it unsettling.

I guess it’s not as bad as Facebook; at least Google doesn’t spoon feed you.

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