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Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

I am very surprised that the number of people who use something else — Kagi or Brave Search or Qwant or DDG or Mojeek — is so small.

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Because Google is still "good enough" for super-duper majority of people doing their searches. Very anecdotal, but sometimes I look at Google Trends / top google searches, and most people just search for very generic things (people, events, big news and etc.), which will return Wikipedia, Google Maps, Youtube, APNews, or some other massive website, and they'll be satisfied when they reach their content.

For every non-satisfactory "recipe" or "review" search, I can see people just forgetting about how they couldn't find what they wanted and since the "wins" of casual searches still overshadows "losses" of specific searches.

I'm not sure if this tracks, but outside of tech industry people, and friends who just Google everything as "my search + reddit", I haven't heard many complaints.

Seriously, I'm surprised at how many devs haven't seen DuckDuckGo's bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

I use them all the time for work. !mdn for MDN, !dnab for .NET, !npm for NPM, !py3 for Python3 docs, !debman for Debian Manpages, !w for Wikipedia, !a for Amazon, !g for Google when you really need it.

I'm not affiliated with DDG; I just really, really love it.

This really feels like someone living in an echo chamber. Asking my extended family if they've ever used DDG or even heard of it would yield very low numbers and I have a large extended family. Most users don't even know you can use things within Google search like "site:" to attempt to control the results.

Just look at that list of bangs you provided. It's a techie/dev's wet dream of sources. Not one of them is something somebody's mom is going to give one iota of a concern about.

This exists in Google too with just writing “MDN” at the end of your query.

Bangs are no not "asking the search engine to return all page of a particular website" but rather "directly use the search engine of that particular website".

It's a bit using the a particular search engine from your browser.

Right but at the end it has mostly the same effect.

If someone tells you defaults don't matter, they are lying to you.

Do these engines avoid AI-generated content?

Anecdotal but I found that I come across much less seo spam in general since switching to Kagi. I do use the feature to adjust certain domains’ ranking so these might just be the fruits of that.

I’m using Kagi too but I cannot imagine how they’re immune from this.

Not sure, but Google could end up hosting AI content themselves and earning money on it… the incentives are worse for them, I am afraid.

No, but these alternative search engines are less likely to surface blogspam sites that are the biggest users of AI writing. On Kagi, you can block those domains when they come up. On Millionshort you can scope your results to exclude the top 100, top1000 or top10k domains. That clears out a lot of the garbage.

I've tried Kagi, Brave and DDG for extended periods and ultimately their results are even worse in most cases and leave you going "hmm, I wonder what Google would give me".

It's the enshitification of the entire internet, not just Google unfortunately.

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