Hacker News Reader

Comment by gee_totes | Hacker News Reader

/me straightens DuckDuckGo independent evangelist hat and nervously rings doorbell

"Judging from your comment, you sound like the perfect user for Duck Duck Go!

If you set DDG as the default browser for chrome/ff, you can search mdn with just '!mdn foo'. Also at your fingertips is searching !jquery (and hundreds of other search shortcuts)

DuckDuckGo is great and makes searching super productive!"

/me smiles eagerly

View on HN

Or you can just go to MDN once, right click on the search box, choose "Add a Keyword (...)" and then use "mdn foo" in the URL bar.

Bang syntax seems such a small feature to change search engines.

How is that different from searching "mdn foo" right now?

This lets you use MDN's own search functionality, like DuckDuckGo's bang syntax.

Can I ask you why you see DDG as the perfect alternative to google? One would think that if you are concerned with the sort of things google is doing, you would bank on an open source search engine, so this sort of thing doesn't just repeat itself.

Because there is less typing to do searches. As a developer, I only have a limited number of keystrokes in me before I run out and die.

I have both YaCy and Seeks (distributed open source search engines) in my FF search bar, but the results are really... disappointing. I just get good results with DDG.

DDG's commitment to privacy and not bubbling, etc. I do not believe are going away, it's their biggest selling point.

Besides, as long as RMS is demanding that DDG be the default search engine in the GNU web browser, it's good enough for me.

I'm using DDG, well, sometimes, and I really, really want to like it. But its reliability and performance -- just in producing search results let alone relevant ones, has been sorely lacking for the past 3-4 months.

Exactly. I am all for a competitor to google that offers some sort of useful features google doesnt, but the straight truth is that DDG does not provide as relevant of results, and you can feel how "dumb" it is compared to the results google is giving you.

It could be some sort of personal bias, but I search the same term in both engines and get (in some cases) wildly different results, rarely in favor of DDG.

Doesn't DuckDuckGo's index come from BOSS[1]? What happens if Yahoo cuts that?

[1] http://developer.yahoo.com/boss/search/

I switched to DDG permanently a while back, and using it as a pass-through for other searches has been great. Saves me the effort of keeping up with a bunch of custom search bookmarks myself, and they're intuitive enough to guess (for example, I started working with Node a couple of weekends ago and naturally assumed that !npm would be available; same experience with !bgg for BoardGameGeek).

The only thing I hate about using DDG is the lack of a synchronized history. It's very helpful for me to find past Google Searches through Web History, because it works cross device.

You might want to check YubNub [0], which is an enhanced version of this prefixes idea. If anything, you don't have to prepend your queries with ! there :)

[0] http://www.yubnub.org

Reply on news.ycombinator.com