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Comment by alesua93 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

"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.

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