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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I would be very curious to see what percentage of these are "!g" queries, but this is still awesome. Very happy to see they are doing well. I'm definitely a full-time DDG user.

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Since switching to DDG, I haven't used Google Search once nor !g. I've had a better experience with DDG: no sponsored results, less skewed rankings, less censoring (Google removes many results from DMCA requests), and of course no tracking. Google's lazy-loaded useless suggestion boxes, added a few years ago, that push the content down, often when clicking on a link, were my final annoyance before switching. For the first bit after switching, I missed seeing the daily Google doodles, but I'm now more cynical towards Google and no longer care.

I've been using DDG for a while now as my primary search. I've found it does a much more literal searches, but doesn't always interpret the intent of my sentence as well as Google does.

I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but it's become much less frequent.

I pretty much always go with whatever DDG has for most things. If needed I'll redo the query with "!g" to confirm an d in my experience there are a lot of times the DDG query was better in my opinion. Things like about locations or very recent news are usually easier to find on Google though.

I also use "!a" and "!yt" all the time as well.

lol, I came here to post something snarky along the lines of "...of which 95% are !g" but you beat me to it and did it in a nicer way too :-)

And yes, me too - I do love DDG, very happy user.

Same here. I find myself doing that a lot... My experience is that Google's search results are superior to DDG's.

As a counterpoint, I also use DDG with a !g fallback. I'd place the success of fall-backing to Google at 20% at most. (i.e. most of the time, if DDG fails, Google will fail too).

One factor you might not be thinking about is that if you use DDG first then you're getting a biased sample. You only try Google when DDG fails. So you see some times when Google succeeded where DDG failed, but you don't notice the times when DDG succeeded but Google would have failed.

I sort of prefer Google Results too. Specially when searching in Spanish.

What I dont like is the amount of captchas Google makes me solve (perhaps because I dont use Chrome or keep my Google account open)

I’ve been using DDG as my sole search engine for years. I didn’t even know !g was a thing.

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