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Comment by ravedave5 | Hacker News Reader

I have switched to DDG and about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google. That said between DDG and firefox it's working! I am getting really vague generic ads sent to me instead of direct targeted ads. Ads in the wrong language, ads for products that have absolutely nothing to do with me. I love it.

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I haven't used Google in years. Not sure how many but at least three. DDG is plenty good enough for me and of course Firefox, since Windows Phone got nixed. Being ex-Microsoft I was lucky enough to never have need of any non-search Google products (Gmail, sheets etc.).

I use DDG despite needing to search Google often, because the bang commands (!w, !wa, !hackage, !g) are so dang nice to have.

You can put those in your browser and skip the middleman

Most of the time DDG is good enough for me. Occasionally I'll make a long tail query that only returns a handful of results on DDG and it's hit-or-miss that Google has anything better.

Me too, but I'm still glad to give 70-90% of my searches to ddg, and I hope I'll help make their search results better

DDG just uses Bing under the hood I think

afaik they have their own search clusters, and sometimes use other search engines when you specifically ask them to.

>about 20-30% of the time I have to switch to google.

What kind of searches are you making? I switch for fewer than 1% of my searches.

Anything in Spanish. Anything technical.

Also, for searches that "really matter" like when trying to get real work done, I end up trying them out in Google anyways to see if I missed anything. At which point, I wonder why I'm using DDG at all.

Maybe it depends upon the specifics, but for technical queries I've found DDG to be hands down better than Google for years at this point. Google used to be great, but with the dropping of both code search and specific matching even when using quotes, I've found it to be pretty terrible in recent years compared with a decade back.

Comes and goes for me. On an average technical search these days I'd say DDG is easily equal to Google and on the rare occasion I still have to switch to Google.

DDG had a period a few months ago where when I toggled on my country-specific search, the results were _spectacular_, language specific, relevant. Then it went away again. :/

It did make me hopeful that they're working on something to improve this.

I used DDG as my primary for a full year (2019) after using it on and off for several years, but I went back to Google and Bing this year. DDG has terrible results and about half the time I ended up using Google anyways. Image search is a travesty; current events often produce zero results.

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