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Comment by noja | Hacker News Reader

For those of you using a single search engine: try DDG, but if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead.

Or use Firefox's smart keywords https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

You could configure it to use:

  g something  # to search google
  d something  # to search DDG

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> if your query doesn't get the results you want (less often these days), prepend it with !g to search google instead.

The `!g` can show up anywhere, not just at the beginning of your query.

Also, other possible `bang` shortcuts: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

I wonder, do the DDG people use the `!g` things as a way to further-refine their search algorithm?

For example, if someone does the !g thing, after searching for the same thing without !g, that implies the DDG search didn't give them what they wanted. Conceivably then DDG could run that search themselves and use that for training their algorithm a bit more, mooching off of Google's results.

There's probably some kind of horrible implication there that I'm not thinking of.

ANECDATA:

on one hand, as a dedicated user of !g on DDG for many years, my urge/need to use !g has gone down almost exponentially (despite being firmly in muscle memory)

on the other hand, when I do turn !g, I find more and more that I still don't find what I'm looking for

this is either down to:

(a) Google's results getting worse over time

(b) my searches getting more obscure over time

I suspect (c)

As a frequent user of google, I think a is not to be underestimated. Google has gotten more aggressive with stemming and other forced "corrections" to your search. This (I assume) helps in general but can frequently result in undesirable search results if you are attempting to search for words like in spelling but unrelated to common words or uncommon senses of common words, both of which seem to occur somewhat frequently in technical jargon.

There's something to be said also, I think, for the ever expanding mountain (of 90% shit) that is user-generated webcontent that must be sifted through by any search engine: The problem of searching the internet is itself getting harder and harder by the day.

They don't have a search algorithm. They're using Bing for the search results.

They have multiple providers and choose one based on query text and region. IMO this counts as an algorithm.

The horrible implication is something like searching for:

> "is satoshi nakamoto really tombert from hacker news?"

Logging the searches back at the Duckquarters is exactly the kind of privacy invasion you use DDG to avoid. Also they would have the burden of proving it's not PII for GDPR purposes even if they don't log any IPs etc.

Gah, I didn't think that this is how I'd be outed :)

DDG actually says that they track queries, just no identifying data to them.

I only really find myself consistently needing to g! for super recent results, like breaking news or a sports score.

Admittedly some of Google's advantage here is the sheer scale of the compute resources they throw at their crawlers, and I don't know if DDG actually maintain their own index, but I'd love it if they noticed and slowly added those sites to some kind of more-frequently-updated list.

I use DDG strictly for the bangs!

So nice to type "vintage flute !e" and land on eBay or "john 3:16 !bLb" straight to a Bible verse.

Google attempts to give you that without requiring explicit !targeting, but results are middling-to-positive, IIUC.

+1 for !bib—I didn’t know that one.

Alternatively, use !s to search StartPage and get Google results without having to load a Google webpage.

You can also use the bang as a suffix, which I find a bit easier when I already have a query.

You can even !g put it in the middle of the query if your text cursor happens to be there

I've found that both !{string} and {string}! works equally well.

> if your query doesn't get the results you want (...), prepend it with !g to search google instead.

Do you realize how inconvenient this is on mobile?

It requires 7 (!) taps on the screen to restart the search.

I'll switch to DDG as soon as they implement a "search on Google instead" button at the bottom of their first results page.

Firefox mobile supports extensions. I bet it should be easy to write one for the purpose. Maybe my next weekend project if not already done?

Brave for iOS let’s you select a default search engine and then lists other search engines below. So the flow is

Search DDG by default —> can’t find results —> click browser search bar again —> click Google icon and does a Google search

That's nice but (you guessed it) I don't have iOS. I think it should just be a part of DDG, as it is also the simplest solution. Perhaps they can just show a bunch of common "!..." buttons, so they don't even have to use the name of Google.

second this. Should have tabs for Google/Bing results on the page.

You don't have to put "!g" at the beginning of the query. Just put it somewhere in the query -- at the end, or in the middle, anywhere where it is separated by whitespace.

Also, many soft-keyboards these days let you type common symbols, including "!", by holding down some key, or holding down a key and dragging across a popup. This makes re-searching on google take 5 or 6 taps -- one to edit the query, an optional one to drag the cursor to be between search terms, three for " ", "!", and "g", and one for the "enter" "search" button.

I recommend going with !sp or !s instead of !g, so you use Startpage.com. It is a search engine that uses Google as the back-end, but removes all trackers and logs.

My startpage results are a subset of my Google results with poor relevancy. I understand it's supposed to be the same, but in practice it's not, and no amount of tweaking settings, cookies, etc fixed it. It's so odd.

Presumably that is because you're outside Google's filter bubble, which is kind of the whole point of DuckDuckGo and Startpage et al.

Google's results for you are better for you because Google knows too much about you.

A tradeoff for privacy is less relevant search results, or as I like to think of it, access to pages that Google was hiding from me.

My favorite bangshortcuts are !gh for github and !aw for the archwiki

!gm some address

to search Google Maps

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