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Comment by DethNinja | Hacker News Reader

I also did the same but DDG is still worse than google for technical search.

We really need more competitors at search engine space but DDG is still far away from google for technical semantics search.

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Sometimes it does, but it's good enough that I've switched to DDG as the default and just use !g when the main DDG search misses the mark. Not having to deal with Google cruft anymore is worth it.

That was a problem for me at first, but another small change in behavior made it slightly better. I've gotten so in the habit of using my search engine as the first step on the web that I've caught myself doing silly things like searching for "mdn <some JavaScript function>" instead of just going directly to MDN and searching there. I don't know when that behavior started but it's pretty goofy. Most of the time when I'm looking up something technical, I want the official docs.

I've been trying to change my behavior to go directly to those sites instead of relying on the search engine to take me there. Same with thinking I might want an answer from Stack Overflow. Go directly to Stack Overflow and search there.

Sometimes I want to find blog posts etc., and if DDG doesn't do a good enough job I'll fall back to Google. My goal is to move Google further and further down the chain and try to use it as little as possible.

It's been my default search engine for years now and it seems to be fine for me, even with highly-technical searches. I'm resorting to !g less and less, and most of the time I don't get better results from that, either.

quickref.dev works fairly well

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