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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried just using DDG? I’ve been using it for years and it’s about as good now (for my searches) as Google used to be.

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I'm seeing there's some niche cases where it's worse (especially with some extreme quotation-mark-heavy searches) but I've switched a few months ago and never looked back.

The thing is: Most searches aren't even that complicated. Whatever "magic" (read: extra processing power) Google uses is mostly helping for extreme niche cases. The rest they seem to do, nowadays, is "editorializing" results, pushing popular websites before more relevant ones, displaying results from some internal database, etc.

Not the parent, but a stupid reason why I can't use DDG is that it doesn't support IPv6. It's extremely unhelpful when you're doing some IPv6-only testing and then can't search for answers.

As far as I can tell, 6 years ago the reason was that AWS didn't support IPv6[0]. It has for 2.5 years by now though.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180909174057/https://duck.co/f...

That really sounds like a 2 hour fix max on their end; just some user facing dns What am I missing?

They seem to use load balancers, so it indeed should be that easy, unless they haven't migrated to EC2 VPC.

I doubt they have any IP-dependent code, since their main selling point is not tracking anything.

Switched to DDG recently and was pleasantly surprised to find how well it excerpts the top StackOverflow answer for technical questions. Just for this I would it's actually a better option for developers, at least for 95% of your queries.

I should do it more. Maybe exclusively for a week and see how it goes.

I've actually run into Gabriel a few times online and had a bit of conversation with him. Nice guy. Can't really say I've chatted it up with Eric Schmidt...

Once I internalized "just add !g if the results suck" using ddg became practical for me. And I don't know if it's me or ddg actually improves over time but I feel like I'm doing it less and less.

Sometimes Google seems to be better at guessing the context especially if you search for C and some other term that has a bunch of different meanings.

Yeah, it's been months since I tried searching Google for something and the last few times I didn't find anything better than what DDG was giving me.

!g is wonderfully helpful (but not too common for me).

I find it pretty funny that I automatically add !g when the Google results suck as well.

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