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Comment by pgt | Hacker News Reader

Google seems to be slowly self-immolating.

I've stopped using Google Chrome and Google Search. The only time I use Google Search now is when DuckDuckGo doesn't quite deliver and then I do so using an incognito window. Next step will be to ditch Gmail, and then Google Cloud & Firebase.

This might sound silly coming from a lone developer in South Africa, but my experience is that we live in the future, and developers with a mass intuition is rarely wrong. If the trend continues, then in 10 years' time this will be the popular view.

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They're making their money, the US probably will never slap them with any meaningful antitrust lawsuits, and they also see China as a long term investment, so there's no reason to see them as self-immolating. Maybe they're doing so for people in the know, like those of us on HN, but most of the world doesn't see it the way you do. To most of the world, Google is still that innovative company with the friendly looking logo that makes gadgets.

>> when DuckDuckGo doesn't quite deliver

Which is 90% of the time when you are looking for IT questions. Unfortunately. I am hoping they are going to get better, it would be so good to finally stop google search.

I use DDG exclusively, and many of my searches are technical. I haven't found any cases where DDG fails to find something that Google finds.

I'm not suggesting that it never happens, but it's certainly not anywhere close to 90%, or even 9%.

The main reason I occasionally venture into google is for news -- "!gn something specific" can return better results if I'm looking for a specific article I recall seeing a couple of weeks ago. That said there's also far more rubbish in the google news source, it's far less useful on the whole than DDG, but occasionally it reveals the right result.

Ah, that makes sense.

I've generally found what I wanted via the DDG news search, but I haven't used it enough to seriously evaluate its quality, unlike the main search engine. I've also had reasonably good luck with "past week" or "past month" searches on DDG, but those aren't news-specific.

Which queries in particular? I've found duckduckgo to be quite useful especially for IT questions because it actually listens when I tell it to search a phrase verbatim. If I try to google an error then I keep getting all kinds of stuff that is vaguely related but with no mention of that particular error whatsoever.

StackOverflow stuff, for me. I always have to prepend `g!` to those.

Google must index SO better or something because there's always so many more useful results (particularly in the little "sub-results" below any SO result) than what DDG gives. E.g., compare:

DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=bash+pass+argument+to+anoth...

Google: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=bash%20pass%20argument...

It looks the info you want is in at least each of first 4 results on ddg. Specifically the 1st ddg result for me is a stackoverflow post with the question showing how to pass individual arguments and the answers explaining how to pass a variable number of arguments. (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3811345/how-to-pass-all-...) I would say ddg gave better results.

They're getting much better.

I have to agree that DDG seems to struggle with developer terms, but that is probably a cost of not knowing that I'm a developer. E.g. compare search results on Google and DDG for "Rust http". Google knows I'm looking for a crate, but first result on Duck is for the Steam game, Rust.

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