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Comment by badconvincer | Hacker News Reader

It’s not enough to exist. You actually have to perform at least comparably, which DDG doesn’t unfortunately.

I use DDG exclusively, and also run Firefox on my Android phone and my desktop. No chrome, no google search anywhere for me.

I’m sorry you were downvoted.

I’ve tried to replace Google with both DDG and Bing. Both of their results are frankly terrible compared to Google’s. Google’s transition to its current hybrid Ask-Jeeves-style question/traditional query search engine, along with its inline answers above the result list both blow its competitors out of the water. Google also does a much better job of letting the user know the freshness or up-to-dateness of results with its inline last-modified/updated time stamps.

Both of those things have made it impossible for me to switch off of Google without immediately having problems quickly finding relevant, up-to-date information on the web. I do desperately want to switch, though.

I also especially despise AMP. It constantly breaks websites and itself, especially on iOS.

Yeah I've tried DDG reliably for nearly a year. A good 30% of the time I end up having to run my query on Google anyway.

I will literally pay money for a search engine that's privacy focused and can get closer to Google in terms of performance.

I reckon I'd pay for that too, actually sounds really, really awesome (assuming the performance is there)

Personally I need to switch from ddg to Google maybe 0.1% of my searches, but at least for you you've managed to avoid Google 70% of the time, and it's not like adding a !g to do so takes more a milisecond.

Right, but running 30% of your searches a second time, after looking through unhelpful results on the first attempt, takes more than a few ms.

For me, it is 70% I have to use Google.

Even for not-that-obscure bands, all DDG needs to do is return the wikipedia page and it fails to do that.

I agree, and I'm still very thankful for DDG. Would gladly pay to have someone take me even further.

How long ago did you try DDG? Years ago I had a similar experience to you, and switched back, but now DDG is much better for me, and I only try !g < 5% of the time, often with no luck there either.

A good 30% of the time I end up having to run my query on Google anyway.

A 70% reduction in Google sounds like a win.

Absolutely it is.

DDG is fine for many types of queries. It also doesn't have many of (what I consider) the drawbacks of google's search: hostile ad positioning, AMP, autoscraped meta crap. Pretending you can't compare them is ridiculous.

90% of my search queries, particularly the ones I make from my phone, are really dumb.

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