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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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