Hacker News Reader

Comment by dleslie | Hacker News Reader

It's funny, I've gone through a number of search engines. Webcrawler, altavista, lycos, yahoo, google and now duck duck go. DDG is the only one that hasn't been an abrupt switch. I would search DDG, then !g if I didn't find a tolerable result. But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using !g altogether.

More often I want !w, !gh, !mdn, !msdn, !v, !osm or similar.

It's that which makes DDG great: instead of being one search engine to fit all, it's a portal to services with specialized information. If you're using DDG's basic search to find specific information then you're using it wrong.

View on HN

> But that's increasingly changed in the last few years, to the point that I have stopped using !g altogether.

Funny thing. I'm used to DuckDuckGo results being unsatisfactory and reflexively append !g when the results are bad. Recently I've been doing that more on Google.

I think it would be really great if DDG suggested bangs when you do a search. I often don't know which sites may be best for the search I'm doing.

I was the same until I started using Kagi. I was planning to force myself to use it for a while to test it out, but after two days or something I changed my default search provider and not because of politics but because of results.

It feels like going 15 years back in time - to the time when Google found what I searched for instead of mangling and/or ignoring my actual query every single time.

(Note: it seems some people consistently get better results. I'm not saying it is impossible to get good results with Google, only that I personally have given up.)

Edit: I might sound like a paid shill but I am not. I only know the Kagi founder via HN as freediver and I have not received anything, neither money nor anything else from anyone related to Kagi. (With one big exception: good search results :-)

Well, searching "Kagi" won't give you any results on Google, so would have been helpful if you provided url: https://kagi.com/

Edit: Rant about Google removed.

Google knows about it if you try searching for kagi search engine. Still not amazing, but given how mad I'm at Google I better compensate slightly.

In duckduckgo.com it is the third result when I just search for kagi.

IIRC I read somewhere that Kagi limits you to only NN searches per day, but I forget how low NN was. Low enough I didn't investigate further.

I never hit it that limit.

Also with Kagi I don't have to test n different options to get ahead of dumbifier AI that keeps rewriting my queries into something that is simpler to answer :-]

For the last few years I've been trying to switch to DDG since I have already stopped using all Google services except search and maps. Until recently I was more often satisfied with Google results than DDG. Something has drastically changed in the Google's search algorithms in the last year or so and now I'm fully switched to DDG, as it gives me better results than Google, even for the basic search.

Sometimes I still try Google when I don't find useful results in the DDG but more often than not, there are no useful results in Google either.

Still, I don't know what should I do with Google maps, as I use it to find local businesses and when they are open. I don't use it for navigation at all, it's more like an address book for me. Haven't found a viable alternative yet. It's especially hard since I'm in a country that doesn't have good coverage in either Apple maps nor OSM.

Aw neat; I didn't know about that feature of DuckDuckGo. I used to have similar keywords configured in my browser ("gg", "wiki", etc), but as the years go on I've become less and less willing to invest that time every time I switch to a new computer. Now I have a reason to set DDG as my default search engine again.

DDG is built on Bing, and their business model is the same as Google's. As long as you share this last part, search content quality will suffer.

We will need a company that does not rely on this model- ex: Apple

Yes, but what the comments are saying is that DDG has an advantage over other searches because their bangs allow anyone to easily use another websites search function, so by using DuckDuckGo you aren’t limited to Bing and DDGs search.

Try Searx, it allows filtering search results with one ! and redirection with two !!: https://searx.me/.

What makes Bing different than Apple?

The business model - i.e. how they make money

The bangs make it great. The keyboard interactivity makes it awesome. Being able to search, and then use the down arrows to select a result, and then press enter to follow the result, is super awesome, and I'm surprised Google hasn't gotten that right.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com