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Comment by memset | Hacker News Reader

Way cool. Going to try using this as my default search engine for a while.

I really really like the "alternative to" feature. What could I do to help you get better at alternatives which are not as popular? (eg, "alternative to cheetahmail" or "alternative to grubhub" or "alternative to xkcd"?)

Also, what kind of feedback would you need to help improve the tech-related searches? Like "ebcdic table" or "1010 in hex"?

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The alternatives are pulled from http://alternativeto.net so adding to their site will add to the zero-click info.

You can contribute to tech-related searches by contributing to the open source zero-click info (see this tutorial https://github.com/duckduckgo/duckduckgo/wiki/Open-Source-Pl...).

You can also send in ideas here: https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/forums/5168-plugins.

Obligatory meta-comment:

http://alternativeto.net/software/alternativeto/

I tried it as default engine for a month and unfortunately had to go back to Google. There are some nice touches (such as automatic wikipedia links) but in many cases the results are just not as good as Google gets.

The shortcuts are what converted me to a happy user. Programming question? "my search !so". Map? "address !m". Will True Knowledge have a good answer? "How old is Obama? !tk". For Wolfram Alpha: "How old is Obama !wa". Is Google really the best place for the answer? "who won the australian open !g". Even if 90% of your searches are google, ddg is a great way to access it!

The thing is that, for example, for programming questions google finds it on SO without any shortcuts needed. If I type address in Google it will give me a link to the map anyway. I know it takes a second to type !whatever, but you need to remember that. And if you need to stop and think "was it !so or !s or !stack or whatever it was?" you lose your concentration and next thing you know you've spent half hour browsing unrelated articles on Wikipedia. Exaggerating a bit but the point is these !things are a speedbump.

I disagree. Most of them are extremely intuitive. Heck, I've once found out about new bangs I didn't know by typing in the name/abbreviation of the site as a bang on a whim, and it worked!

Also, if you think the bangs are unintuitive, what's your opinion on keyboard shortcuts? It's basically the same thing.

I agree, DDG is very cool.

As I understood a while ago that Google tracks my search habits, I avoid using it. I went back to WebCrawler, Cuil, Altvista, Bing... None of these compare to DDG in terms of quality.

Great job. It is time to get an alternative to Google. Don't be evil is just a silly marketing gag.

Does Bing not track your searches?

I don't know, but I expect they do. This is too big business nowadays.

But, as I written, I did not check and don't want to spread rumors.

there's already a goodie for base conversions (though currently base conversions are done via Wolfram Alpha, not sure why).

Ideas for more goodies are on https://duckduckgo.uservoice.com/

Not sure what uservoice is, but there is also an official trello board: https://trello.com/board/duckduckgo-open-source-plugins/4f08...

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