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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

My story is the same! Also, when I want colouring pictures for my kids, DDG just lets met tap them and print them. That is nolonger possible using Google since some months. I also very much appreciate the code snippets when (already started typing "Googling"!) Searching for code related things.

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I recently had to search for something similar to this:

march 12 2019 + 366 days

and DuckDuckGo gave me exactly what I wanted while Google gave me not-very-useful results.

The date command can also answer this question:

  $ date -d 'march 12 2019 + 366 days'
  Thu Mar 12 00:00:00 PDT 2020

pure gold buddy, thanks for this

I starting thinking about the Python equivalent of this and it was disgusting.

This?

  $ python -c 'import datetime; print(datetime.date(2019, 3, 12) + datetime.timedelta(days=366))'
  2020-03-12

Yes.

Raku is a lot prettier than Python:

    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12").later( :366days )'
    2020-03-12
    perl6 -e 'say Date.new("2019-03-12") + 366'
    2020-03-12

Probably because I have a finance background, I would go straight to Excel.

Which makes dates out of things that are not even dates! (Like gene names)

Which recently became even shorter:

    raku -e 'say "2019-03-12".Date + 366'
    2020-03-12

Beautiful.

Ruby isn't much better

    ruby -e "require 'date'; puts (Date.parse('march 12 2019') + 366)"
    2020-03-12

For GNU date, yes. BSD not so much (default on MacOS).

    MacOS$ date -d 'now + 30 days'
    usage: date [-jnRu] [-d dst] [-r seconds] [-t west] [-v[+|-]val[ymwdHMS]] ...
  [-f fmt date | [[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.ss]] [+format]GNU$ date -d 'now +30 days'

    GNU$ date -u -d 'now +30 days'
    Sun Apr  5 18:55:12 UTC 2020

(In BSD date, the '-d' argument "Set the kernel's value for daylight saving time.")

assuming you're on Unix

you could be running gnu/linux or windows with msys, neither of which are unix

If you are on Windows, (or if you are on Linux but for some reason still runs) in PowerShell:

> (Get-Date).AddDays(365)

Or excel, rc[-1]+366, assuming you typed in the date you want in the cell to the left...

I literally do this with google all the time though (my girlfriend like us to celebrate N * 100 anniversaries). Every hundred days or so I go to google and type "500 days after [date]" or something to that effect and it works. It was the first thing I tried, it works reliably every time, and it's google providing the result in the results page, which is better than a link to a website that would do it for me.

What query did you do on google that didn't give you so good results?

Being the socially inept person I am, I would find this exhausting.

Depends what "celebrate" entails. The calculation of dates is straightforward at least.

The example I gave above should suffice to demonstrate the differences. Just copy the second line and paste it into both search engines.

So, to be clear, Google is lamer than DDG because it supports the natural language expression `X days after M D Y` but does not support the mathematical `M D Y + X days`

I guess Google has figured out with its trillions(?) of queries how humans search and not how nerds search.

Why not be more inclusive and enable both how humans search as well as how nerds search?

Sure, nothing stopping them, and I'm not arguing against that.

Interestingly it seems that DDG also supports "human" search: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=500+days+after+march+12+2019&t=can...

(Also interesting that you can infer that I'm on Ubuntu from my sharing of the search URL, though.)

every nerd is a human

I just pop open wolframalpha for anything that needs more meaning to it. I'll keep DDG in mind for next time.

WA is great for certain more complex mathematical or informational queries but usually requires me to dig around to find syntax since the NLP isn't as fluid as I'd like it to be.

I basically view it as a slightly more friendly/natural than traditional Mathematica interface.

If you use DDG as your universal search but want to go to WolframAlpha for your query: x + y !wa

Try answering this one without looking it up:

February 29 2020 + 365 days

Pretty sure that’s because google got hit with a lawsuit about hot linking. DDG will suffer the same fate once they get big (and rich) enough.

I can't say for sure but I bet that's a problem they would love to have.

Yep, Getty Images sued them and Google had to remove the view images button, making the process of viewing the source image more difficult and convoluted.

I've now resorted to using DDG anytime I need to do an image search, and have been using it more and more myself when searching for anything related to IT or programming.

For those interested there’s an open-source Chrome extension that brings back the View Image button:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/view-image/jpcmhce...

https://github.com/bijij/ViewImage

Awesome, thanks!

Yandex Image search is also very good, with none of the annoying limitations that Google has introduced. There also seems to be less Pinterest spam as well.

https://yandex.com/images/

Pinterest spam in DDG is a major annoyance, thou directly viewable images compensates somewhat.

I wish I could permanently remove pinterest from my version of the internet - it's literally spam at this point that never contains the content I'm looking for and adds no value while polluting search results.

ddg has -site:pinterest.com

but i dont know ho to automatically append that to every search, which is what i want.

I could at least plug that (and a few others) into my default CLI search as part of the query string.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22506360

You can also set your user agent to googlebot and get the old google images back. Also the search results don’t look as bad.

Now "google" is a common enough word for generic online searches that the sentence "I googled 'australian licorice' using DuckDuckGo's image search" doesn't sound weird to me.

See definition 2, under the transitive verb form of the second etymology: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/google#English

That still sounds weird to me. I obviously understand what you mean, but I still don't like the idea of saying "I googled x on DuckDuckGo".

You can say "Have a look, I just duck this up.."

"I'll just duck on to the web and check"

Regarding coloring pictures, I use coloring.ws (not affiliated in any way with the site, just a happy uncle)

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