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Comment by brabel | Hacker News Reader

As much as I would like to agree, as a user who has DDG as the default search engine, this is not my experience... DDG consistently gives me useless results when I search for less popular languages results (searching Dart, or the search-friendly dartlang, gives me crap every time, while Google finds stuff easily... sure, Dart is by Google, that may be a factor, but if I remember correctly, results for Groovy and very new languages like Unison are a lot better at Google) I unavoidably have to use !g to turn to Google. To the point where when I am at work and cannot afford wasting time, I use Google by default.

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I just searched for "dart" on ecosia and the programming language showed up on the first page of results. I also have bad luck with duck duck go, but I think ecosia proves that the only reason bing is bad is because Microsoft is incompetent

Does anyone know of a Firefox plugin that automatically adds a "!g" upon a gesture on mobile?

I'm asking because adding the "!g" takes about 6-7 screen touches so it's quite inefficient, and it basically keeps me from using DDG.

When I use a mobile I usually type G! instead of !g because of autocorrect, and it works just the same.

What do you search? When I search "string dart" the first link is to api.dart.dev.

PS uh, rather the whole page is related to dart.

Good point, it's possible to send a request to add a bang, but it would be better if there were an interface like in Chrome or Firefox to set up own searches.

I do prefer not leaving all my data with Google though to combine with other activities of which I may or may not know of and I think it's good to use alternative services as much as possible, especially when I use Google just as an interface to surface information from site like Wikipedia or Stackexchange.

(note I'm not affiliated with DDG, I just also went through the process of De-Googling after Inbox was shut down)

I'm sad to have to agree. I tried ddg as my primary search engine for about 3 months. By the third month I was just adding !g by default because I just wanted results without testing quality first. Then I realized how silly it was to use it for almost every search, which I'd been doing for about a week, and switched back.

Cannot reproduce this -- Searched DDG for 'dartlang' and all links on the first page relate to dart programming language.

Also google having more results you are looking for sometimes doesn't mean you can't have DDG as your default search. Just enter 'dartlang !g' when you want to search google.

I agree. I find myself using the !g bang any time I’m looking for software related queries.

I found this to be the case a few years ago. But nowadays it's uncommon that I need to switch to google, even if searching for technical things.

Just searched for "dart", got the programming language as the second result + the right-side Wikipedia box.

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