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Comment by jaems33 | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me of why I first moved to Google from Yahoo/Webcrawler/Altavista/etc in the first place.

Yup. Since this is trivial for Google to copy, it's unlikely that it'll actually disrupt Google in any way, but still...very cool.

The technology is trivial, but the reasons behind it and philosophy that drives it aren't.

Google isn't going to come along and say, "oh, guys, you're right...Wave, Buzz, Google+ all a mistake. Social Graph..Mistake!. We're sorry. We are rolling everything back to 2004"

Google has been increasingly more frustrating for power users over the last couple of years. People are looking for alternatives. DDG is one, this is another. Power users matter, and not just because they spend more time inside an application, but because they recommend it to others.

A perfect example of this is firefox. I used firefox a lot, and then switched to Chrome. I've since switched my mother, grandpa, brother, girlfriend, sister and too many friends to count to chrome. I now use DDG for all my searching needs via the bang syntax (!, !g, !w, etc). It's only a matter of time before the rest of my family follows along.

Ah, I was unaware of the !g bang syntax, that's a great one. I'm also fond of !archwiki, and all the language bangs. DuckDuckGo is the only search engine that I know of that could take over a significant portion of search traffic. By significant I don't mean tens of millions, but I mean a dedicated userbase who use it in leue of Google.

Just out of curiosity, what does DuckDuckGo do that conventional keyword searches in Firefox or Chrome don't do?

I have DDG set as my default search engine, but can you do the following:

! fuji Ames => takes me to Fuji Steak House in Ames Iowa directly

!w Sushi => Takes me Directly to the article on Sushi on Wikipedia

!m 801 grand ave Des Moines => takes me directly to google maps at the address.

I still probably do about 30% of my searches using !g kicking me straight to google for search results.

But how is that different from regular keyword searches? If I want to pull up the Wikipedia article on sushi in Firefox, I enter "w sushi" in the URL bar. If I want to read the Arch Linux wiki article on pacman, I type "arch pacman". If I want to watch Friday by Rebecca Black on Youtube, I type "y Friday", etc. I feel like there's more than a 50% chance that I'm missing something. What does DDG do that browsers don't?

I typed in "w sushi" into chrome and I got https://www.google.com/search?aq=f&ix=ucb&sourceid=c... which google set to my default. I expected to get "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi

Do I have to setup all these different keywords to work? If so that's the difference. It's essentially a pre-configured command line with literally hundreds (thousands?) of predefined syntax for searches.

Yes, I set those keyword searches myself. So the difference seems to be that with DDG, you just have to learn which shortcuts exist rather than customizing them yourself. That doesn't really sound like it saves much time, but it sounds like the real advantage of DDG is that the act of reading through the DDG list of keywords would probably give me ideas of useful time-saving shortcuts that I'd never think of making on my own.

Of course you can put all those keyword searches into your browser. The only difference is that DDG has already made a huge selection, so you don't have to, anymore.

So basically, DDG probably has a whole bunch of !bang searches that you simply had not thought of to create your own keywords for, yet. And when you need it, it's already there.

There are also a few !bang queries that are not external searches, such as one for rolling dice (it can do !roll 3d6+3).

Another minor difference is that you can add the !bang keyword anywhere inside the query, also at the end. Being able to add it at the end makes it easier to "ok let's try this on another search engine".

It isn't always simple for large organisations to copy/implement trivial/common sense things.

While Google has it's head up its' ass^H^H^H social stuff, there doesn't seem to be any effort to actually improve search.

I may well have this very wrong, wouldn't be the first time, but wont google loose a hell of a lot of money if they dont return the top results? It might be "easy" to implement technically, but I suspect it will completely muck up their revenue stream.

Perhaps there might be a great irony of this site becoming popular and using google ads to finance it!!!!!!

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