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Comment by psv1 | Hacker News Reader

> I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

I have - I found the results far less useful than Google's, the whole experience far more frustrating and it noticeably slowed down my work.

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I find it's a mixed bag -- sometimes DDG is better, sometimes Google is. It kind of reminds me of the old days pre-Google-dominance when you'd try Alta Vista and then Lycos or Excite if you didn't get what you were looking for.

Cynically, I wonder if Google has gotten to the point where they realize that serving the absolute most relevant results means they sell less ads. Of course, I don't think anyone is ordered not to make search quality better, just that incentives/resources get reallocated to things other than ten-blue-link quality.

I agree entirely with how you described the search experience. I would often try three or four ways to get a website I wanted back in the day. I am finding myself learning what search engines I like more for specific types of searches. Some times that means google, some times DDG, and who knows throw Bing int here.

I agree that the DDG results, especially for software development related searches, are often worse than searching Google or StackOverflow directly. So here's my workflow:

1. Search DDG. If I find a decent result, I stop here.

2. Append !so to the end of the search. This searches StackOverflow directly. If this works, I stop here.

3. Append !g to the end of the search. This searches Google directly.

This way Google becomes a last resort.

Also worth noting that you can actually navigate DDG search results using vim keybindings without the need for a plugin: something Google dropped support for a few years ago.

My concern about Google isn't big enough to justify going through this.

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