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Comment by phamilton | Hacker News Reader

I spent a week on duckduckgo and I jumped ship because it was slower than Google. The queries took longer to return and it took me longer to cognitively process the page (because I'm so adjusted to Google.)

I'll use it when I want independent search results, but Google's catering to my interests usually works in my favor. When I search for Ruby on Google, all of my results are about the language. DuckDuckGo gives me results about the gem.

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I believe to remember a recent discussion on HN where Gabriel seemed to be somewhat astounded by how important query speed is, even when we're talking about seconds here, and promised to look into that. I guess we have become spoilt and now cannot go back to waiting if only three seconds sometimes.

I've been DDG as my default search engine in Firefox for quite a long time now, and sometimes I still find myself re-running a query with "!g" - mostly when I expect to have to tweak my query once or twice and google is just faster (and still gives better results sometimes).

Google works in the world of ms not seconds.

Yet DDG will never be as fast as a real search engine since it relies on external APIs (Yahoo BOSS, etc).

I stuck with it for nearly a month and it made me fall in love with google all over again, both for its speed and the quality of the results.

I think I would have been able to stick with DDG through the speed issues as painful as it was, but too often I found myself going to google anyway after failing to even find what I was looking for on DDG.

I switched from Google after the DDG redesign a few weeks back and the slowness is getting to the point that I am thinking of reverting. I considered Blecko, but the few queries I tried were far worse than DDG. I would consider Bing but the design is horrible.

One nice thing about the bang syntax is that if DDG fails I can easily rerun the search on Google. I don't end up switching back to Google out of frustration after a bad search.

If DDG is too slow try disabling JavaScript. It is much faster then.

I've been on ddg for a couple weeks now. I agree the speed is, by far, the biggest issue. I find it quite inconsistent..sometimes its ok, sometimes is slow (3+ seconds). Though, I've gotten used to it somewhat and it rarely bothers me. Think I'm gonna stick with it.

"Sometimes it takes me as much as three seconds to exhaustively search all of humankind's knowledge."

Seconds add up fast when I'm researching a topic and need to run several queries. DDG has to compete on the things people care about or no one will care about DDG.

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