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Comment by npsomaratna | Hacker News Reader

I switched to DuckDuckgo a few months ago, and never looked back. The results used to be far inferior to Google's - but they seem to have caught up recently. If you haven't tried them out within the last couple of months, I strongly recommend that you give them a chance.

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I switched to DuckDuckGo, made it maybe two weeks, and finally gave up and switched back to Google. Their search results are still vastly inferior to Google.

Can you give an example search that doesn't work for you?

No? I don't have a list handy, and I’m not the QA department for DDG. The point is - and yes, this is somewhat subjective - I found the quality of the results inferior to Google, and grudgingly switched back after a few weeks of disappointment.

You're certainly not alone, but I've had such a wildly different experience. I switched to duckduckgo primarily because I preferred the search results. The privacy aspect was just a bonus.

The only time I ever find myself using the !g escape hatch is when I'm searching something brand new (e.g. a breaking news story). Duckduckgo has a recency filter but it seems to take them a few days to ingest the content.

Same here. I'm still using duckduckgo on my private devices (phone and home laptop), at work I'm using google. I suppose the reason this works for me is at work I need GOOD results, thus google search there. At home I just need a search now and again, so duckduckgo is good enough for this.

So, my private life stays my private life with duckduckgo. And at work — I don't really care what google does to my "js shortest path algorithm"-kind-of results history.

From earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19043565

"ED survivor" is a tricky term to search for. Is "ed" an acronym or the name Ed? But still the first result gives you an instagram link about eating disorders and body dysphoria. Since you were trying to figure out what this term meant, I'm assuming you could figure this out from context.

I'll give you that the results aren't great[0] and that Google's results were __MUCH__ better here, but it did get you to the answer you wanted with the first link. Maybe we search different, but at least in my experience I don't frequently have results like this. Rarely do I reach for "!g" and usually when I do the searches are so niche that Google struggles too.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/HvFTGT1

Excuse me? I didn't get an answer in the first link; there wasn't something pointing me towards the answer in any of the results on the first result page.

Incidentally, nowadays I'm using DDG much more than back then. I don't know whether the search results improved or whether I calibrated myself so that I know better how to phrase my searches. I'm still using many !g, but only maybe half of the time.

I'm teaching Kleene's Recursion Theorem. This morning I tried "exercises for recursion theorem" in both. DDG's first page results were not useful, Google's were.

I'm still struggling. Out of principle I've set my default search engines (desktop/mobile) to DDG, but all too often I'm using the '!g' tag to get back to Google. Especially with programming-related queries I just don't get close to what I want in DDG. Google always seems to have the right information the first time. It's unfortunate, because I keep trying to use DDG as much as possible, but the quality just isn't there for me.

Somebody here taught me the !s bang. That sends you to startpage.com. startpage uses google's index but they don't store your data.

>they don't store your data

This might have changed because they've been bought by an ad company

Startpage was acquired by targeted ad company System1 in December 2018 (but neither company announced the acquisition until November 2019, for some reason).

https://restoreprivacy.com/startpage-system1-privacy-one-gro...

All true points, but I'd rather risk being tracked by a company that would be completely cratered even more than they've already been by being bought by Privacy One than just go straight to the devil himself, so I use the !s and just mentally treat it as if its a slightly better form of !g rather than before where startpage was all the benefits of Google search without most of the drawbacks.

Hi - Startpage person here. Just FYI: We don’t collect or share your personal information. The Startpage founders continue to run the company as before and they have control over the privacy components of Startpage. With this investment, we hope to further expand our privacy features & reach new users. You may have already seen some of these new initiatives taking place. 1) Unfiltered News Tab launched in November: https://www.startpage.com/blog/product-updates/launching-unp... 2) Privacy Please! Newsletter launched in last month: https://startpage.com/blog/company-updates/welcome-privacy-p... 3) We're pushing out more info via our blog & social than before, giving greater insight into: How we make money - https://startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/advertising-res... How we keep your search private - https://www.startpage.com/blog/privacy-awareness/how-does-st...

It may depend on your particular field of search. I have been using DDG for quite some time and pretty often I need to use !g due to the low quality of the results on DDG only to realize I'm presented with equally bad results from Google. It's possible that for my regular searches DDG is good enough, and the more targeted ones are just too difficult.

Same. I'm about 70% DDG and 30% Google right now. Honestly, with "!g", I'm okay with it. Even though I don't get 100% privacy, its better than 0% privacy.

I switched to DuckDuckGo a number of years ago and while yes, their results have become better there are times in my line of work where I've had to use !g search item as Google still seems have to have the best results sometimes.

Granted this is maybe once or twice in 3 - 4 months I end up using !g prefix.

Another helpful thing that can be done with Firefox is to add google.com to a container. One of the things google does that I really dislike is personalized search. Having a container specified for it lets me use the browser more naturally without having to open a private session.

You can also configure firefox to never leave private mode—I can’t endorse this enough.

Do you know if there's a way to get it to work with containers? Often, I'll use a container to remain logged in to a site and white list its cookies. It'd be good if non-container pages were in private mode by default.

Have been using Ecosia and I have to do a `g` search pretty much daily. Though the use Bing underneath, so maybe it's worth giving DuckDuckGo a try

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