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Comment by amirmasoudabdol | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been adopting and promoting DuckDuckGo for more than 2–3 years now. I can say that the transition period was quite long actually. I was invoking !g very frequently at the beginning but I force myself to at least probe a few first items first before trying Google. After these years I rarely use Google, and every time that I actually search something on Google, before even seeing the result, Google welcomes me by the whole TOS/Privacy stuff and I close the tab and try the DDG a few more times. I think the friction of accepting their privacy policy makes me think twice.

If you like DDG, recommend it to friends and coworkers. I usually put a link in newsletter if appropriate.

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I've switched my default browser search engine to DDG, but I still find myself missing Google results. I miss those knowledge graph results (or whatever Google calls those sidebar boxes).

Also, I've found that DDG cannot consistently display a weather forecast widget for the query "[zip code] weather". Sometimes it will show a weather forecast, and other times it will not display it--very frustrating. Any idea why? Even just refreshing the results will switch to displaying the weather widget, which leads me to think it's either a bug (I'm in Firefox), or they don't actually have the data for my zip code and are going to fetch it after I make my request?

How about !weather instead of just weather? You can even pick your source: https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=weather

When I search !weather it ships me off to weather.com. I REALLY don't want that to happen. If I wanted to go there, I would have just typed in that URL.

I don't see why it's worse. If you want to know what the weather is, why not go to a weather site? What's the advantage to seeing the same (or less) information on a search results page instead?

Not OP, but I was so happy when weather was built into google a few years ago.

Weather.com is pure evil when it comes to tracking and clickbait. It's also slow as hell.

Yeah but I covered that in the second part of my comment. See https://duckduckgo.com/bang?q=weather

I guess this boils down to what is my goal. Here's two plausible goals from my perspective. I go to DDG and ask for it to give me a sample of some sources from which I could find the weather. This is a traditional search. Or, I could go to DDG and ask it for the current weather. This is what I really want.

There's no scenario in which I already know which weather source I want to use, memorize its ! command, navigate to DDG, then enter that ! command. That's too many jumps. If I want the weather from weather underground or whatever, why would I ever go to DDG to start with?

I have DDG as my default search engine, so I just type "!wu 01234" in my address bar. This basically skips the DDG navigation and UI entirely. I like this type of shortcut for Wikipedia and IMDB too.

Anyway this is just a workaround for when the weather infobox doesn't automatically show up in the DDG UI, which it normally does.

There are over two dozens weather bangs.

!wu = weather underground !owm = open weather map !nws = national weather service

to name a few alternatives.

Funny enough, it doesn't have a bang for Dark Sky, which is the source for the weather info box when it has one.

I think the issue is they may not want to go to ANY other website - they want the widget. What do they do then?

"$city weather" works for me every time. Even more specific regions of cities works.

Why bother launching a webbrowser then? Save ram:

curl wttr.in

UI's have value, as does integration into a browser. Not everything is solved by a CLI for all

This is kinda silly but for me it always works if I do it in the other order: ie. “weather 12345”

Maybe try that?

The biggest problem with DDG for me is how easy it is to game. Try doing research on new cars/trucks and you'll find most results at the top are trash sites like 2020-make-model.com and the like.

That's a problem with Bing (the underlying search engine), not DDG.

It's bing..

Use !mill to filter DDG searches through millionshort.com.

You can also go directly there. [1]

Change the 1000000 to however many results you want to remove from the top of the results list.

1: https://millionshort.com/search?keywords=weather+22222&remov...

Agreed, it’s easier to game. But often these ‘spam’ sites combined with an adblocker actually mean you get the content you wanted without ads and bloat.

Where as the ‘official’ site has a long load time due to design bloat, videos and other non-content which can’t be blocked with a simple blocker because it’s a part of the actual website.

Google seems to assume name brand websites have good content. I rarely agree.

Similar story for me. Until a few months ago probably 90% of my searches included `!g`. Then at some point I just got out of the habit, and now I usually don’t even think about the fact that I’m on DDG’s result page instead of Google’s. I have no idea if it is because the results actually got better or if I just got used to them.

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