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Comment by randrews | Hacker News Reader

This kind of worries me.

On the one hand, Google isn't the best web search tool. I've switched to DuckDuckGo, and so has everyone who's seen me use it. But, I think Google still provides a valuable public service: indexing the entire web and handling that much traffic is not an easy task, and a lot of other things (like DDG) depend on that humongous cluster.

So on the one hand I want to see the best search engine win, but on the other hand if Google goes out of business (or more likely, starts losing money and canceling projects) then I'm afraid it'll take a lot of things out with it, with no clear replacement.

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Indeed perhaps time to give duckduckgo a try. They seem to actively filter out all ad sites. I've been going nuts in the past couple months with google searching for technical solutions to problems, command clicking on links to open in tabs and discovering that most are clone ad sites from a question on stackoverflow.

It was these that won me over: http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html . Most of the time I know what general sort of thing I'm looking for, and I'm happy to give the search engine hints if it'll help. Even if I don't, it'll essentially flat-out ask me what sort of thing I want, and then give me more specific results: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=ruby

But, I mean, I'm doing all this by typing it into Chrome's address bar. And a lot of the time, DDG is just returning results from Google's API. I want to use DDG, but I want to make sure Google still exists because I need it even if I don't use it.

I just use the browser, instead of the !bang feature in Duck Duck Go.

Chrome / Firefox have the option of adding a search shortcut.

For instance I type "py package-name" for searching inside Python's index, or "am product" for searching in Amazon, or "w something" for searching Wikipedia, or "t some words" for doing a google translate, or "hn something" for searching Hacker News.

Chrome even does these shortcuts automatically, so you can just "amazon.com android" and it will do a search on amazon; although in Firefox it is easier to add your own.

FWIW, Opera has this too, and in fact had it first, by about 2005.

DuckDuckGo uses the index and ranking of Bing, not Google.

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