Comment by aiurtourist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aiurtourist | Hacker News Reader

I tried using DuckDuckGo for a few days. Here's what I found, YYMV:

• Google's results are much better. A handful of times I searched for something I would think, "Wait, that can't be all there is," and Google would give me back what I was looking for above the fold.

• Google is much, much faster in returning results for my regular searches, which are usually programming related or an esoteric Wikipedia topic.

• DuckDuckGo's bang syntax (!jquery, etc) isn't any better than search keywords built into Firefox and Chrome.

• DuckDuckGo's settings page is like Skyrim -- epic and freeform.

• DuckDuckGo is a very well-executed product. The UI is clean, browser integration is smart ("You're using Chrome! Click this!" or something), and it's tailored for my savvy search users.

I tried using DDG for a few weeks, and I had the same experience as you. I frequently found myself doing the same search on Google to see if there were more results, but the biggest issue for me was speed - both Google and Bing are blazingly fast, and I found myself being annoyed with the noticable delay in DDG.

There are typically more results on Google. But the extra results are usually of a far lower quality (often just spam sites, or other grabage).

I'm very satisfied with using DDG as my primary search engine. And when I feel my search results aren't finding what I need, I might go to Google and wade through the garbage to try to find the gem I'm looking for. But it's rarely worth it.

  > • DuckDuckGo's bang syntax (!jquery, etc) isn't any
  > better than search keywords built into Firefox and
  > Chrome.

Having never used DDG, the advantages that I can see:

1) You don't have to set them up, because they are already there.

2) You get them from whatever computer you are at. You don't have to setup or sync the keyword searches with every computer you use (or public terminal).

3) If you use DDG as your main search engine, it's right there, so you can use a singular search interface.

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