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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Jumping in here with an example, since I'm in the middle of doing this right now.... I maybe have some ID Theft issues, so I'm doing some searches to try and figure out if I can find anything that might help me answer what's going on. Did this company screw up and confuse my account with someone else or do I have a real problem? I'm doing different searches for names, locations and some other searches for very specific things. Google results are far and away better, in that they are returning things that are useful. DDG results are... different, and when compared to what I'm getting with Google, they are not as good. I don't know how much I can generalize from this one example, I don't normally compare G with DDG, but right now, G is winning. It's really interesting comparing the results though. DDG may indeed find something G didn't since the results are pretty different.

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I've been switching to DDG as well and I haven't noticed my life change in any measurable way. You might be right and my results may have been better using Google, but I am willing to make that sacrifice in order to participate in a world I prefer.

I suppose I consider it like this, Google's results might also be better if they didn't show me so much spam. I don't know. My life isn't that much improved due to them. I don't know what I don't know.

I'm okay not having a 10% faster car as well. I'm okay with that. I'm willing to drive a slower car to save the environment. I'm willing to make that personal decision for what I think will be a better internet too.

We can't constantly say, what's best for me, what's best for me without expecting that everyone on the planet doing that will never lead to a planet that's best for all of us. My search results might be 10 or 20 or even 30%, without Google, but the world is better without Google, IMO.

I use DDG as my primary engine and my habit is to search there first. I have to say, I often don't get the results I'm looking for. So, I simply "bang" out a google search immediately after using DDG search "!g [search phrase]". My coworkers chastise me for being inefficient, but hey, I see it as a small price to pay to support DDG while still getting the results I need.

You can append the !g at the end!

Thanks for the tip! This is gonna save me a lot of Cmd + Left Arrow.

If you’re in a Mac you can simple type ^a for the front of the line (and ^e for the end). The standard widget has some Emacs bindings built in (since the NeXT days)

It's kind of what I'm also doing Sometimes I know that the I'll end up using google, so in those cases I just use it from the start (mainly development/coding stuff). But for daily things and personal stuff, like movies, release dates, I just use DDG

At this point, each has its strong points and weak points. For what you're doing right now, Google sounds like the better choice.

But my experience has been that it really depends on what you're doing. There are a number of projects I've researched where the duck has provided better information.

For now, it's worth trying both. That can be seen as a disadvantage because it's twice the work, or as progress because competition is a good thing.

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