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Comment by half-kh-hacker | Hacker News Reader

I've taken to using DDG and when I find that the results are unsatisfactory, I stick a '!g' at the start or the end of my query, and it redirects to the google results page.

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That seems like a good approach until you consider that you don’t know whether the results are unsatisfactory if you aren’t looking at both sets of results on each search. You can’t see what you don’t look at and you can’t know what you don’t know. Google may have a better result for you, but how would you know unless you search both engines?

“Unsatisfactory” is an opinion-based comparison. If you find something that satisfies your desire, it’s satisfactory. I’d say your argument is more based on whether the results are more accurate, or “better” in some more concrete way.

That's not what satisfactory means.

Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it

I JUST ran into this. It's not good for tech searches for this very reason. I was trying to look up an issue with an application, and every link I clicked on was from 7 years ago.

I switched to google and instantly grabbed some ones from 2019

This is the kind of feedback DDG should take seriously.

then use DDG's time filter.

That's tough when the only filters are "1 month", "1 week", and "1 day". Is there some way to get 1 year? I ask as a daily ddg user

I was doing g! at work for tech searches so often I switched back. I gave it several months of effort. One example, I was googling an AWS service related question and the front page was blogs and garbage. g! had the official docs at the relevant part as the first result.

This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.

You could use s! As an alternative to startpage (which serves google results but without google directly tracking you)

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