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Comment by CGamesPlay | Hacker News Reader

I switched back to Google after using DuckDuckGo for a few months. The reason I switched back was because DDG was slow! I found myself waiting for DDG when I was running all of my silly currency conversion search queries, and didn't have the same problem with Google. (I'm located in Europe.)

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To address some of the comments below, the slowness I'm talking about is probably P80-ish. Most queries run fine, but I was noticing throughout the day that some queries would randomly take multiple seconds to resolve. I never timed them, because just re-running the queries would work around the issue, so I suspect it's some backend thing on DDG's side. Google does have similar issues for me, but it feels more like P99-level.

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I have a hard time believing this has anything to do with ddg. Im in europe and had been using ddg since the very beginning and cant recall ever having this issue

Really? I've just tried it and it was instantaneous. Currency conversion with ddg from firefox title bar in the UK. The result was visible before I had mentally completed pressing enter.

I agree, DDG is slow. Not slow enough to make me switch but still quite annoying.

I searched for something arbitrary (the word "omnipotent") and it came back in about 2 seconds. What are you getting?

My point is that Google is faster at displaying a page, even if the results are loaded in Javascript after the initial page is displayed.

The results take the same time to appear, but Google feels faster than DDG.

I have never experienced it being slow. Been using it for at least two years

I’m in Europe as well. Just searched for "200 USD to EUR" on both. DDG felt slightly faster, Google had a white screen for a moment before it loaded which was chiefly what made it seem slower to me. So I’ll allow the possibility that it’s because they do stuff when people have adblockers (Not that Google is even a serious option if you don’t run adblockers). Both of them were almost instant in any way though.

I'm curious why you didn't go to qwant. I'm not in europe, but I think it is, and uses the same bang mechanisms as duckduckgo.

In my workplace qwant is the default SE and I'm sorry to say it, but its awful. Maybe if you search in French it will be a bit better.

I'm using DDG and I'm quite happy about it. Very rarely I switch to google and if I do it usualy to search some location specific things like nearest pharmacy.

I can’t stand their key: "&"

"!" I can easily type just with my left hand, "&" requires left & right hand working together. For something, I use as often as bangs on DDG that is simply not acceptable.

DDG should really have a button that says "Search on Google instead".

That way, people can use DDG and easily fall back onto Google when the result is slow or inadequate. I know about the bang-syntax (!g) but this requires about 6 touch actions on mobile.

They do, just type !g within your query. There are many !bangs that you can use https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You didn't read the last sentence of my comment ...

Just give me a button I can hit whenever I want Google's result instead, and I'll gladly switch to DDG.

You can easily add a button to do that with something like Greasemonkey. I added a script that adds a button to GitHub that shows the file sizes in an extra column when clicked. Adding a button that adds !g to the front of a DDG query and then sends the search request is easier.

How slow? Seconds?

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