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Comment by sshagent | Hacker News Reader

Thats kind of where i was. Now though i'm persevering with DDG. If I'm unhappy with a search i just prefix it with a !g and runs it again via google. I hope that shows something to the DDG guys to know some things we still use Google for, but overall I'm fairly happy with DDG

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Same here. I tried DDG years ago and gave up pretty quickly because it wasn't there, then tried again more recently and was positively impressed, but it still lacked some accuracy, then I tried again last year and made the switch. So is DDG better than Google to me? Nope, and hopefully it will never be, because the only way to get on par with Google, let alone beating them, would imply on DDG side to get as much data as possible about me just like Google does, which would defeat their entire raison d'etre. So I'm okay with DDG being slightly less accurate, and when it doesn't find what I'm looking for I revert to Google for that single search. Currently I use Google on the average from zero to 3 times per day, which is ok. That's however a choice by someone who values his privacy more than having to press a few more keys or waiting a bit more time to find something; I wouldn't expect the average user to agree with this. DDG could one day conquer hearts and minds of most technical people, but going beyond that will make an entirely different and much harder challenge.

I'm on the other side of this I think. I've been trying to use DDG for everything for the past month or so, but the number of times I'm having to stop, copy what I just searched for, add a !g in front of it, and search again is just getting silly.

If there were some way I could just use a hotkey to redo the same search in google, this wouldn't be such a big deal, but having to break up my flow with all the extra copy/pasting or retyping is getting frustrating.

You can just put the !g at the end you know, also I'm not sure why you are copy/pasting?

Something I just recently noticed: You don’t have to put the bang in front of the search. It can actually be anywhere in there: “!g foo bar”, “foo !g bar”, “foo bar !g” all work.

Saves quite a lot of time.

The !g (and other bangs) makes the switch seamless. If I don't like the result just rerun w/ !g.

And then after about 2 months of having to double-search 70% of my queries I always end up switching back...

Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results.

I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.

(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)

For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.

I double-search less than 10% of my queries. I’ve been using ddg for the last four years. I think people that have to double search very often have been trained by google to use queries that aren’t supported by ddg.

Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.

I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.

I had the same. Tried qwant.com and now I have it once every 50 searches.

I wish i could create a button that quickly reran the search with “!g” instead of typing it.

You can bookmark the bookmarklet that I just created at https://codepen.io/durovo-the-typescripter/pen/GRRqRKX

Alfred lets you set up "fallback searches": https://www.alfredapp.com/help/features/default-results/fall...

Should be pretty easy. Create a bookmarklet that grabs the window.location.href, then appends '!g' to the beginning of the query and changes the location to the appended string.

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