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Comment by chrischattin | Hacker News Reader

I switched all my default search to DuckDuckGo a few months ago because of stuff like this. No regrets here. If you haven't tried it recently, give it a shot. It's gotten tons better in the past few years. Once you get used to it, it's as good as Google search.

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I've been using DDG as my default search engine for more or less a year now, and tbh I find myself using the !g bang way more often than I'd like. Basically anytime I'm searching for something dev related or anything that's broad enough that without my personal user info it would be hard to return the results I'm looking for. Which is kind of the crux of the issue I believe. For everything that's wrong with Google as a company in terms of privacy-related issues, the truth , at least for me, is that many times (not all) it ends up being... quite convenient I guess.

YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on.

"YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on."

Yeah, I had the same exact feeling a couple of month ago and created this [0].

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com

Looks interesting! I'll give it a look, thank you!

I'm surprised I've never heard of this. The results seem pretty good too.

Searching for my username on DDG returns an entire page of results on "glanders", a "contagious zoonotic infectious disease that occurs primarily in horses, mules, and donkeys". I don't find anything related to my name until page 2.

Runnaroo, however, has my GitHub profile as the first hit and my person website as the second. I like those results!

Firstly, thank you!

"I'm surprised I've never heard of this."

It is only a couple months old, so not many people have heard of it yet, but I have been trying to make an effort to share it more vs. just staying behind the computer and adding features. It did get a nice bump recently when Brendan Eich tweeted out a link to it. That was a really cool surprise.

"Runnaroo, however, has my GitHub profile as the first hit..."

I'm also working on adding Github right now as a Deep Search source, so the below results will soon be integrated into the SERP for that query.

https://api.github.com/search/repositories?q=gpanders

I just checked this out and did a search. The last result was for amp.reddit.com.

Replace !g with !s to get Startpage results, which is basically proxied Google results. Although I would advise just not relying on Google at all. The perception is that it's better, but in recent years I've found Google results to be total trash.

Yeah, definitely, I'll try to replace !g with !s in the future. It is my intention to replace whatever google services I can. But admittedly, since this change is mostly motivated by personal ethics and a desire not to give away my private info (as opposed to issues with the platforms themselves, in terms of functionality), it is a bit rough to adjust to some changes.

Startpage is really interesting, appreciate this! I too !g more often than I'd like, I'll try !s.

Unfortunately, the results Google feeds to Startpage are degraded and suffer from the same relevance issues DDG has.

It really isn't as good. I want DDG to be awesome. I'm not in the Google ecosystem, and don't care for their business practices. I would be happy to dump them.

But Google search is noticeably much, much better. They've got us over a barrel.

I kept seeing comments on HN about how DDG was as good as Google, so i've switched on one of my machines. It isn't.

For stuff that doesn't matter too much, or is an easy search, i use DDG, then fall back to Google if i don't find what i need. For anything serious, i just open up a Google tab :(

Well, sometimes what you're used to matter too. For me DDG is better (expect for local searches, in which case I've got to include my city's name).

Every time I search anything in someone else's computer (with google) I find it much harder to find what I'm looking for, sometimes I can't find and just go to DDG.

The only times I use !g is when I find some pretty obscure programming errors and no (useful) results on DDG, and only once in a while google is able to find anything better, usually the results are the same.

It's interesting that there are such diverse experiences of DDG vs Google. I'm also in the camp of finding DDG to be better at finding what I'm looking for.

I wonder if the difference has to do with variations in search strategy or interests, or a combination of both. In any case, DDG does seem to have been improving, and I don't see any reason to believe that the trend won't continue. Particularly since Google seems hell-bent on making their search useless.

I start with DDG and fallback on Google only when I can't find something. But I find that DDG is good enough for about 95% of my searches.

I completely agree. I loaned a friend an old phone, and it took him a couple months to even realize ddg was default search and not google.

And there are so many nice features, like the !bangs search prefixes, and the ability to store and sync your preferences as a passphrase, without requiring an actual account.

The dark scheme is also quite good.

the only gripe i have with DDG is missing 'site: "somewebsite.com"' option. Is there a way to achieve it?

I mainly use it for '*.countrydomain' to get results for a specific country.

I think you want "inurl", see here: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sy...

yes, exactly, thank you. Not as powerful as a specific wildcard, but good enough.

sadly, it doesn't work with .something, so 'inurl:.co.uk' doesn't seem to work. Works with 'co.uk' but that's only valuable with longer suffixes. something like 'uk' is a bit too common.

"site:somewebsite.com some_search" works just fine on DDG.

sorry, just checked, it's the wildcard that isn't working. So 'site:*.co.uk'

"whatever site:uk" https://duckduckgo.com/?q=whatever+site%3Auk

Appears to work?

yep, that works, sadly .uk doesn't so domain endings that are commonly found in words can't be used.

Try the hidden param "sites"

http://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo&sites=stackoverflow.com

The 'site:' operator already works in DDG how you describe.

DDG is mostly Bing under the covers for organic results, so most of Bing's advanced [0] searches will work in DDG.

Edit: Interestingly enough I can't get the 'IP:' operator to work in either Bing or DDG.

[0] http://help.bing.microsoft.com/#apex/18/en-US/10001/-1

DDG has basically equivalent results for most things, but I find that I use !g for programming stuff enough that I've gone back to just using the Google site for those searches. It feels like Google has better results for more recent programming topics.

Most programming searches are just stack overflow, at least for me. So, I just add `!so` to the search in DDG. It's the same as using "site:stackoverflow.com #{what_youre_looking_for}"

Now if we can just get people to stop saying "Google it" instead of "search it" or something else which doesn't involve being a constant two-legged advertisement for Google, maybe others will start to realize they have options.

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