Hacker News Reader

Comment by Craiggybear | Hacker News Reader

I like ddg and find its results far more useful.

Really? In my experience the results are far less relevant. I really tried to use DuckDuckGo, because of the privacy advantages - even set it as my default search engine - but the results just aren't as good. It's also slower - noticeably slower. I very much hope they can improve to the point where they're on par with Google in terms of quality and speed, but they're not there yet.

TBH speed is the most important reason for keeping me on google, even though I know privacy should really take precedence.

Our speed varies by location right now but this is changing as we get servers in more locations around the world.

also you can't use it as a verb. Google this, google that. You can easily duckduckgo my contacts... nah, doesn't sound right :)

You can duck or quack it!

nobody will understand it in the search context :) everyone knows how to google, and nobody knows how to duck

"Search (for) it."

Most people are going to use Google, maybe Bing, maybe Bahoo!, and are barely aware of and would not use another search engine.

Those that do know about DDG will either use it or not.

Whenever I include a search link in an email (or HN thread) it's always a DDG link, except for those rare searches where I get nothing back from DDG. I think that's one of the best ways to promote DDG. Bonus, the DDG search links are unadulterated.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duck+duck+go

Firefox, Ubuntu plus whatever 2 or 3 way deal Google has with all that:

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=11&xhr=t...

Chromium, Ubuntu, plus whatever deal ...

http://www.google.com/#hl=en&cp=6&gs_id=m&xhr=t&...

I didn't ask for that, and I would have to clean that up before I pasted that google search into an email.

Opera etc:

http://www.google.com/search?q=uzbl#pq=philadelphia&hl=e...

And by the way, if you want to search google a little more anonymously, do it via DDG. In your search bar or on DDG's page, type in !g your search term. You'll be redirected to Google's search, and the URL will be relatively clean:

From ddg, !g duck duck go gives you:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=duck%20duck%...

I still didn't ask for the hl=en bit, but it's much better than the cascade of line noise that Google would otherwise give you.

Edit: minor wording.

In theory you can't use the trademarked word "google" as a verb.

I have no idea if Google is still trying to stop people doing this or not.

half the world uses the word "xerox" for a copy machine, "pampers" for diapers, and "jeep" for an offroader. So, google as verb is now completely natural

...and lawyers love people who use those words as verbs, because they get paid every time they write a letter to say that the verb is, in fact, a trademarked noun and could a different word be used, or the trademark be acknowledged?

Google used to (still does?) send cease and desist letters; and they've asked people to only use google-as-a-verb when people are actually talking about Google. Thus "I'll google it" when a person is using Bing is, according to Google, not on.

As my boss at Google always used to say: "Bing it!"

Thanks for giving it a go! We have improved a lot in the past year and contiune every day so I encourage you to try again in a few months if you are still inclined to do so. Result quality also of course varies by query and query type so each person can have pretty different overall experiences based upon ths types of things they regularly search.

I also encourage people to submit feedback with specific result issues.

Do you have an equivalent of Google Scholar? At least 75% of my searches recently have been through Scholar and I would love to find a useable replacement. On the other hand, most of the nasty problems on the front page aren't happening (yet) on Scholar.

No, not yet though you can get to scholar directly from ddg by doing !scholar search.

Yes, really. Its what Google used to be like - before every search term became a commercial opportunity to be exploited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com