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Comment by i_am_proteus | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same way. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few years, and when I started, I was prepending !g to about half my searches. Now I find myself rarely using !g, and telling friends "try DDG" when they can't find results on Google.

Not surprisingly, Google is still better for shopping searches.

edit- DDG bangs for those who were unaware: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

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I've been using DDG exclusively for a while. Honestly I find the results better when I'm searching for things like information about programming, etc.

Yeah, I've been giving DDG a try for the last few weeks again. For "I want to look for keywords" I use DDG and find it does well. For "I want to search a structured database", Google still wins because of its above-the-fold no-article "this is what you're looking for" results.

Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result.

Or if I want to search for a product or local business.

>Like, if I type a math formula or "what's the population of Alberta", the Google result is just the number, not a link to the result.

I prefer to use WolframAlpha for such things.

Just tried this.

I get the answer plus a ton of highly relevant links relating to population, StanCan sources, etc.

I think this is exactly what most users want: Show me the answer quickly without making wade through links - but provide me the links if I want to do more research on my own.

These featured snippets are great for Google, because they keep you on their search pages longer. But they're bad for the websites because they can completely lose your visit, even though they're the ones who created the content.

These snippets also take up more space on top of the page and along with more ads, it means fewer organic links are appearing on the first page.

I found that even DDG isn't that good. It especially doesn't work when trying the usual [query] + " reddit" part. It practically ignores the reddit part. I've found that I'm going back to using Google constantly now - which is frustrating. Most of the results I've been getting are very spammy SEO articles too with DDG. I wish it wasn't the case but for what I've tried - it just isn't working as I'd like.

Try "site:reddit.com"

Thanks for the tip about !g.

They also many other very useful shortcuts. For example !gm is google maps, !gsch is google scholar, !arx is arxiv.org, !w is wikipedia.

There’s a lot that I don’t know: DuckDuckGo.com/bang should have others

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