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Comment by oinksoft | Hacker News Reader

I ceased using Google search except as a last resort when this story broke, and I had no idea what I had been missing out on with DDG: Excellent keyboard navigation. Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day. It seems to listen to my keywords better than Google did too, a growing annoyance I had. If you haven't, you really should try out DDG for a week.

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> Also, DDG's results compared to a year ago are night-and-day.

Still looks 2nd rate. I replicated one of my last searches (learning rails): rails find if element is in array

First hit on google is the stackexchange answer with .include? (which I was spacing-out on)

DDG yields the Array docs, which is correct but is a helluva lot of info when I'm looking for a concise answer.

This impression must partially be due to how you write your queries, and the quality of the natural language parsing in DDG/Bing (your query leaning heavily on that). I searched "ruby element in array", Rails not being a programming language, and I get the Ruby Array docs with the first result (which is what I would want) and the StackOverflow result for the third. On Google, the StackOverflow item is first and the Array docs are third for the same query.

In this case you and I think that our respective search engines are providing the better result.

Don't forget about DDG's great bang shortcuts.

If you ever find yourself wanting to fall back on Google's results, just throw !sp at the front of a DDG search for StartPage's proxied Google service (or !g if you absolutely must go to Google). DDG has many, many shortcuts for directly searching StackOverflow, GitHub, Amazon, Wikipedia, etc.

This is most likely that Google has more user behavior data than DDG. If enough people use DDG and click on the StackExchange link for that query (or similar queries), DDG will be able to get that to the top.

On the other hand, did DDG just use Bing API, and only Blekko crawls the web? Or do I get my search engines mixed up?

That's correct, blekko does have our own multi-billion page crawl and index. And we're private, too.

Every web search engine depends on one of these indexes: google, bing, blekko, yandex, baidu.

Don't forget Gigablast, Procog, Yioop and Samuru which also have their own crawled index.

If you think those are viable sources of results, then by all means include them.

Personally I don't, but it should be noted that there are other indexes besides what you have mentioned. That said Samuru and Procog are pretty interesting.

DDG actually uses a handful of search engines (including Bing), though I think that Yahoo! is the primary source.

Yahoo search results are already 'powered by' Bing.

For programming questions, I almost always append site:stackoverflow.com to my search term... generally the anser is on SO, but I prefer the search engine's results over SO's search... on DDG and Google.

if you're using DDG just prepend your query with !so. Using bang notation is like having every search engine in your search bar at once.

...and of course, I had no idea if !so would work before I tried it. The obvious one always seems to work:)

He said "I prefer the search engine's results over SO's search..."

DDG's bang notation uses SO's search rather than the search engine's results.

Note that DDG's bang notation is also redundant with Chrome and most other browsers that let you set your own search engine keywords. Chrome's is especially nice, just type the first few letters of the site's URL and hit Tab and you're in a site specific search. It works automatically for any site implementing OpenSearch (or you can add it yourself by right-clicking the search box), and you don't have to memorize any keywords, so that's two advantages over DDG right there.

That was discussed here some time ago and many people suggested explicitly omitting SO and StackExchange sites when learning new languages/technologies. The argument was that while the answers on SO generally get the job done, they rarely provide the context, depth and coverage the docs give. I happen to agree - I only hit SO when I don't know what exactly I need to search the docs for. It's absolutely great for this. For serious learning not so much.

http://www.samuru.com is better for concise answers.

Concise, but wrong: It keyed off of "find", so it produced a top hit of items related to that method (which means in rails: find in the database)

Now you could argue that I should have omitted "find", and there was a time where that was how search engines were used, but the fact that google got the semantics right is why it is first rate.

I've done the same. Also switched to Firefox with full Adblock and tracking bugs blocking.

It's not much, but at least I'm no longer leaving a huge slimy trail behind me online.

You still very well may be leaving a trail behind; it's just likely that such a trail won't be correlated among multiple different domains you visit (from ad tracking bugs of a single company embedded into multiple websites you browse).

I'm using Ghostery on Chrome. Seem to do the job.

I really like the how the goodies have improved (or at least the discoverability). There's some really useful / geeky stuff in there.

https://duckduckgo.com/goodies#Science

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+much+magnesium+is+in+43+cubic+...

And they are always there in your im client

http://ddg.gg

Plaintext, though. I wish DDG over XMPP would do OTR.

Isn't OTR usually don client-side?

I guess he was referring to the ddg bot answering your questions over XMPP.

I second the observation that the results have improved considerably over the last year. There are still holes where I have to resort to using the !g option and use google (non-English searches would be the most prominent example) but I've set all my default search options to DDG and haven't regretted it!

I'm all for using DDG on principle, but google search results are still far superior.

I started using DDG few days ago and I am not disappointed so far.

That makes two of us. While lots of people say "well Google won't miss you", I think we still have the duty to do what's right.

The USA was founded as the most free, exemplary democracy in history and what we saw in this scandal is precisely the opposite of what this Nation earned so Google could exist. Then Google betrayed us all and was in bed with the government in the most sinister way possible since 2009.

Honestly? I'd rather give someone else a chance. Then if DuckDuckGo spies on us in the future, I'll switch again.

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