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Comment by carom | Hacker News Reader

It is really worth it to switch to DuckDuckGo. You can throw a g! at the end of your search if you don't like the results DDG gave and it will redirect you to Google. That was the feature that gave me the confidence to switch over, it's painless to get different results, even on a mobile keyboard.

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DDG user here, I’m not even sure most people would need g! anymore. I recently came across a Google search results page, and was surprised how unrecognizable it has become. Instead of giving me a page full of search results, it was presenting me with a page full of Google-curated content. At this point, Google is basically unusable for me as a search engine.

I’m a full time DDG user, but I still use !g sometimes. For some reason DDG is not great with discussion boards like any forum, stackoverflow, reddit etc., especially if the posts are too recent.

Mostly if DDG can't find something, chances are that neither can Google. We've also reached a point where the Google result pages are now ads the first half page. Fair enough that they want/need to make money, but it seems a little excessive.

I think it's been two years since I've used the g!

DuckDuckGo also tracks what links you click on. Try it: when you click on a link you'll see an immediate ping to https://improving.duckduckgo.com/t/...

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself)

I don't think most folks would have a problem with Google doing it the same way - it makes sense that l you'd want to know what search results were clicked on.

The problem is Google has implemented the tracking in such a way that it's hostile to users, preventing them from copying the target link. There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked, but Google chose an anti-user option because it almost guarantees people click the link.

> There are various ways that Google could allow copying the link whole also enabling tracking if it's explicitly clicked, but Google chose an anti-user option because it almost guarantees people click the link.

On browsers that support it (all modern browsers except Firefox) it uses <a href=... ping=...> which is exactly what you're looking for.

Firefox supports it fine but disables the setting by default.

Thanks, I didn't know about this. It's blocked by my ad blocker but I just whitelisted it.

I stopped using Hangouts a long time ago because every link that was sent was wrapped in a redirect through Google. Sometimes that tracking service would be slow and I'd have to copy the links manually. Really infuriating.

Anyways, there is a big difference here. If I copy a link from Google I get [1] and if I copy a link from DDG I get [2].

1. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

2. https://github.com/

They are only posting the domain in my tests.

As well as other bangs too. I frequently use !gh to search for software repos on GitHub, and !a to search for a product on Amazon.

Also, DuckDuckGo has taken keyboard-centric users into account, whereas Google has not. I rarely have to touch my mouse when searching on DDG. Up and down arrows to select the results, enter to go, / to return to the search bar, left and right arrows to go between images and maps and whatnot.

I almost use DDG solely for the UX. The added privacy is just a very nice bonus.

(Tip: you can also type "figlet ______" and it will give you ASCII art for the text you typed. That's neat.)

My biggest hangup is that Google is pretty good at making suggestions based on my past history. You end up losing that doing ddg proxy

That might actually be a good thing, to break free from an information bubble created to you by Google.

I find the Safari search bar to be good at this sort of thing.

Try using !s for Startpage.com results. It is proxied google results.

Or use startpage.com which has Google search results.

( !s via ddg)

I prefer to avoid US services if i have the choice, due to bad privacy laws there.

Isn't it "!g" or do both work?

Both work! Which is really nice on a mobile keyboard since it will do an auto space after the !.

(If you have one that can be and is configured to do so. I don't, because I find that annoying whether I'm writing a DDG query or not! My computer doesn't do that, it's jarring if my 'phone does.)

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