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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

To be honest I’m not sure what everyone else is searching for on Google the search engine anymore. I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases while 9% is for stackoverflow queries, other than that I get all the info I’m interested in from dedicated FB groups and different sub-reddits.

And I’m also a 40-year old guy, from what I can see at people younger than me they spend almost all their web-related time on Facebook properties: Instagram, WhatsApp groups, Facebook private groups (FB the main app is also dying), with TikTok coming strong from behind. All of these are places where Google Search doesn’t have any reach. So one could say that the 2011 mantra “all arrows behind the same big arrow” (or whatever it was) was quite correct, Google+ was Google the company’s major chance of still remaining relevant in 10 or 15 years’ time. They still have YT, too bad they don’t know how to manage it.

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Huh, I've just realised I'm much the same. Google is used by me primarily for (and in this order in decreasing proportion): Wikipedia search, Stackoverflow search, company name search, medical related search, current event search (sports scores, election results), (smallest minority of the time) other random queries.

Everything else I get from HN, Reddit, FB, etc.

The instant google results are the vast majority of the time taken from wikipedia. Sports scores and election results are taken from other sites that Google has started top present quite nicely, but that I could easily get elsewhere. Company name searching is basically just using Maps indirectly.

Google as a raw search query product is dying. A competitor could probably service 90%+ of queries just by being great at serving instant result previews at the top for a set of the most popular data (mass-media, wikipedia, local maps).

I use ddg as my default search and try !g when I'm not finding something, and it's rare that I find something on google that I couldn't find elsewhere.

Usually I find success when it's extremely niche results (usually rare error messages) that have only a few hits on google on some random forum that the other crawlers just didn't index.

You might like DuckDuckGo and “bangs”. https://duckduckgo.com/bang

For anyone reading this thinking "what a killer feature I need to switch to DDG now". All browsers do this natively now. In Chromium engines it's found under "Manage Search Engine". In Firefox it's under "One Click Search Engine".

My Firefox install has seven search engines by default in the "one-click search engine" options. By contrast, DuckDuckGo has 13000 bang shortcuts. Sure, you don't need all of them, but I use dozens: some of them almost daily (like !w for Wikipedia and !wt for Wiktionary), some sporadically (like !tw for Twitter or !a for Amazon) and some of them only rarely (e.g. I picked up a Pokémon game recently and consequently have used !bulba to quickly search Bulbapedia, a Pokémon fan wiki.) Of course I can add all those to Firefox, but DuckDuckGo already has them set up, and has many more that I can use without thinking about them. I think that still counts as a killer feature.

Firefox is a little lacking in that department. Chromium based browsers on the other hand, anytime a search is used on a page, that gets added to the list in your browser's options.

For example, just used HN's search bar, and there it showed up in the options ready to customise keywords to my liking (if I wanted to change it).

Before anybody claims it's an additional step, it's not. DDG requires you to know what the keyword is before you use it, which is the same as having to use the search on the site before. So I guess I agree it's a killer feature if you exclusively use Firefox for the time being.

In chrome you also just start typing the name of the site, until it autocompletes and then hit tab.

For example if I want to want search wikipedia, I type "en.w" and hit tab.

The point of bang is that I don't have to setup anything. And it's pretty exhaustive I often use !gten, !gtfr or !gtes to specify the target language for Google translate. I'm glad I don't have to setup all this by myself, every time I change browser.

you can use keyword searches as native features of chrome and ffx

> "I personally use it as a Wikipedia search engine in 90% of the cases"

I use search keywords, such that when I put "wiki example" in the search bar, my browser pulls up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=example

I also do this with several other sites that I commonly use. In doing this, I've dramatically reduced the number of times I use a general purpose search engine in a day.

The web has been dying since Facebook came along. The internet is growing like gangbusters though.

Just looked at my browser history and looks like I roughly performed 110 searches during past 24 hours and that's probably because I'm having bit slow day. Vast majority of searches were in fact work related (research papers, deep learning, coding, python, pytorch etc). I can't speak for others but I feel ultra-accelerated because of tools like Google. The knowledge hunting would be approximately 3-5 orders of magnitude slower otherwise.

Makes me wonder how much Wikipedia would be worth as a privately held company.

Thank the heavens it's not. Imagine a company controlling the most accessed information aggregation website in the world and trying to make it return a profit.

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