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Comment by chimeracoder | Hacker News Reader

Try prepending !s to your searches when needed in DuckDuckGo.

That will send results through StartPage, which will return you Google's results, but through a proxy (mitigating the privacy loss by using Google).

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Serious question—why would I use DuckDuckGo to use StartPage to use Google?

If I was really privacy conscious, I could go straight to StartPage. If I didn't really care, I could go straight to Google.

Where does DDG fit in?

It's a front-end that gives you one entry point for StartPage, Google, Weather, IMDB, Amazon, [entire bang support list].

Just a search = "keyword list"

I want Google search = "!g keyword list"

I want Google Finance Search = "!gf keyword list"

I want Amazon products search = "!a keyword list"

No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go (AND while respecting the fact that you don't want others to know what you're searching).

Bang searching is obsolete as far as I'm concerned. For any bang search I can think of, I'm confident that I can just search Google for the same keywords (without the bang) and still get the result I wanted. If I search for a movie title, I get IMDB in the top ~3 results, if I search for a product, I get Amazon results, etc.

Which suggests you're happy with Google's filtered/targeted search results

Using bangs, you can skip a step. I suppose if you're using Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" in your URL bar I suppose there is little difference. However, I find there is a bit more effort when you get outside the simple realm of products or celebs.

For example, if you want to search HN, you can just `!hn searchterms` rather than search "hnsearch searchterms", then click. As someone who searches a lot of different resources frequently, the little bit of time saved is helpful.

If DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

I suppose bangs save a user input step (since I have to search from the location bar then Tab + Enter to select a Google result), but I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

> I would gladly trade that for the additional mental steps of deciding which service to search and what the bang shortcut is for that service.

There are hardly any mental steps plural, if any mental step at all. Give it a try and see if there's a bang that doesn't make sense.

Examples:

!g - Google

!b - Bing

!gm - Google Maps (also !gmaps)

!bm - Bings Maps (also !bmaps or !bingmaps)

!d - Dictionary (also !dict and !dictionary)

!t - thesaurus (also !thesarus)

!gi - Google Images (also !gim)

!gh - GitHub (also !github)

!yt - YouTube (also !youtube)

!cpp - C++ reference from cplusplus.com

!hn - Hacker News Search

!aur - Arch Linux User Repo

!trulia - Trulia

!domain - domain name search

...etc

I essentially used bangs extensively many years ago (not through DDG; I set up custom keyword searches in Firefox), and I agree that it worked quite well. I now use raw Google searches, and I think Google is now good enough that it is not worth using bangs anymore (Google privacy issues notwithstanding).

Fair enough. :) As I said in my original post, if DDG's privacy is not a selling point for someone, then I agree with you; bangs are hardly a reason to stick with DDG.

"No one else gives you this much freedom to coherently pass your request directly where you want it to go"

Chrome has this built in, with the added benefit of not unnecessarily sending your searches through a 3rd party, and you can add your own custom searches, and set custom shortcuts.

Correction - Chrome has this built in, with the added benefit of using your searches and browser history for the purposes of serving advertisements (and whatever else they want to use that data for).

And yes, even in incognito, this behavior occurs within the session. And yes, even in incognito, if you happen to be logged into your google account in another tab, it's associated with your google account.

So, I prefer that DDG be my 3rd party, as opposed to Google.

Admittedly, this is personal preference, and you highlight a good point that it is probably simpler to do this via Chrome's built-in capabilities if privacy is not a major concern.

Re-reading this comment, I think you misunderstood. I'm saying you can use Chrome's search engine shortcut feature to search on other search engines, without using Google Search at all.

Just like I can type "!a search terms" to search Amazon using DDG, I can configure Chrome to send my search directly to Amazon if I type "a search terms".

Google can do all of the things you mentioned regardless of which browser you use if you use Google/Gmail/etc Search or visit sites that use Google Ads/Analytics (without disabling cookies or using Ghostery)

Ah! I get you - agreed. I think that's a decent solution, it just seems like configuring Chrome to use DDG as the default engine buys you a lot of those configurations in one change. Either way, good results.

chrome still collects that data

[Citation needed]

using your searches and browser history for the purposes of serving advertisements

I'm not familiar with this. How does it work? Chrome doesn't send my browser history to Google, does it?

I've not investigated the how, or where/when/if data goes places, but consider:

1. In a newly launched chrome incognito window - login to Gmail.

2. Open a new tab and launch Google.com, search for "New Relic"

3. Click through to the New Relic page.

4. Close the tab with the loaded New Relic page.

5. Open a new tab and proceed to 'lxer.com'

6. I get a New Relic ad served from Google here.

Some important notes:

1. Even if you come to this page anonymously, New Relic is one of the ads that will get served. This likely has to do with Google's placement techniques and New Relic's adsense configs and purchases. Nonetheless, with an active search history or browse history involving the given ad, I see a very high likelihood of ad display.

2. From an advertising perspective this is great.

3. From a search perspective, see the don't bubble us discussions elsewhere. Some people like to have search results filtered based on previous searches and browsing. I don't, but I'm perfectly willing to be in the minority here.

4. This technique works for the above specifics (I happened to have noticed the New Relic google ads in conjunction with web browsing in the past), and probably for many others. It will likely fail for many combinations as well. If you search and browse for medical items, they will probably not impact your lxer.com advertisements.

Incognito windows don't block cookies, they just sandbox them from the rest of your cookies and are deleted when you close the Incognito windows, so the behavior you describe isn't too surprising.

But what does that have to do with Chrome's search/history? If I use Chrome's search bar to search using StartPage there's no way for Google to know my searches or even the fact that I'm using StartPage.

I'm just saying you can get the same behavior as DDG's shortcuts with Chrome without using Google at all.

I don't know about browser history, but there's evidence that Google use your user-agent string other connection details to uniquely identify you when you connect to their servers, and to build a history of your search terms even without you having a google account. They can later use that knowledge to serve directed advertising in search results across any of their products.

I'm not saying you should use Google search, I'm saying you can get the same behavior as DDG's !x shortcuts using Chrome, not Google, so I'm not sure how the grandparent comment is related.

but google will just customize stuff for that proxy... how is that better for results quality?

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