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Comment by majormunky | Hacker News Reader

I think you can prepend your search on DDG with !g and it'll search google for you, without leaking your info to google.

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Actually, by searching with !g, you’re leaking your info to both DuckDuckGo and Google, instead of just Google.

If you want to do Google searches without leaking your data to Google, you could use Startpage.com, but personally I don’t trust Startpage more than Google.

I'm not sure about the "without leaking your info to Google" part, there. All it does is forward you search query to Google as if you'd entered it on google.com. There's not really anything DuckDuckGo can do about that.

You gain nothing privacy-wise by doing that.

DDG and google both know what you searched for. It is not a proxy. It just opens google search with the query

I got in the habit of just appending this to many of my queries in time sensitive situations, as if by reflex, negating the purpose (I default my search engine to DDG so !g is the fastest way to Google for me). I am having a hard time breaking the habit.

You can use !s for StartPage for the “Google can’t see my queries” layer.

I don't believe startpage. Either they are lying to users about the Google results, or google is lying to them.

Search for '5vh9ld'. It is reddit post's URL.

https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=5vh9ld

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=5vh9ld

5/7 google results are spam that should have been removed. I wonder if the 0/7 on start page is that sort of spam filtering run amuck.

And, if you trust startpage I think there is a "bang" for that as well, maybe !s or something so a DDG user should be able to reach that too from DDG.

>without leaking your info to google.

Can you elaborate? It just does the same query on Google, how is it preventing leakage of information to Google?

If it runs the query through DDG's server side, then Google would just see at as an anonymous query along with a million other anonymous queries coming from DuckDuckGo's servers.

Unfortunately, that's NOT what they do. Instead, they just forward you to the google search result, which is pointless and stupid.

I imagine that Google would not be happy if they ever were to offer such a proxy service.

> which is pointless and stupid

Not so. The point is that you can set DDG to be your default search engine, and put !g anywhere in the search string to search google in case you need it.

This is what I do as well. Privacy by default, more precision when needed.

Your browser doesn't have a search bar or what?

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