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Comment by slowpoke | Hacker News Reader

My last information was that they used a combination of third party search APIs (Yahoo, Bing, Google) and producing their own search content.

By now, in terms of functionality[1], I mostly use DDG for the bangs, having set it as my default search engine in Firefox (keyword.URL in about:settings) so I can search using the URL bar. I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by now.

[1] I originally switched because I'm very privacy conscious, and that's still my most powerful argument for using DDG, but it's by far not the only strong argument for duckgo'ing instead of googling.

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> I caught myself doing ^T and typing "!w keywords" (to search wikipedia) on other people's computers more than once by now.

You realize that you don't have to use DDG for this, right? You can set up keyword searches in the search bar in Firefox or Chrome (don't know about other browsers) for any site, not just those that DDG supports. Then just type 'w <search>' into the location bar and hit enter for Wikipedia, for example. You can even do cool things like set up custom searches, like my 'wl' search, which automatically prepends 'list of' to any Wikpedia search.

except that DDG has them all set up already. if you want them in firefox, you have to set them up yourself.

I don't see how setting them up is a big deal. Once you know how to do it, you'll use it for just about everything. I'm at the point now where 99% of the websites I visit are accessed via either a keyword search or keyword bookmark (i.e., 'hn' for http://hackerne.ws/). Combined with Pentadactyl (Vim emulator) in Firefox, I browse so fast that the only thing that holds me back is how dog-slow the Firefox UI gets unless you regularly create a new profile and "start fresh" every couple of months. But I try to keep all my stuff in the cloud (bookmarks in Xmarks, passwords in LastPass) so that this is fairly painless.

Besides, it eliminates two keystrokes. Considering the amount of times I look up something on Wikipedia every day, I'd say that it pays itself back in spades.

My impression is that Google also always returns wikipedia when you have "wiki" as a search term. Only an extra two characters.

That's not the same thing as the '!w' feature on DDG or the 'w' keyword bookmark. Once you Google 'wiki <search>', you have to click on the first link. Unless you set up an IFL search, in which case you might as well set up a Wikipedia search.

When you set up IFL search, you can use it for wiki, imdb, documentation, projects' homepages and dozens of other sites that you know you will find in the first spot. I have IFL as my default (w/o keyword) search. When I'm not so sure I just use keyword search (g for google and few others (but not wiki or imdb)).

Good point, although I virtually always am looking for a specific article on wikipedia and not searching the site.

Which is exactly what my keyword search does. For example, if I type 'w hacker news' into my location bar, I'm instantly redirected to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_news

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