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Comment by TallGuyShort | Hacker News Reader

I've tried DDG before on several occasions, but always got frustrated with the quality of the search results and changed back. After PRISM, I started finding Google's results less and less accurate, so I tried again. I now find that for most of the searches I do, DDG results are letting me find what I need faster than I can with Google... Kudos to them! I applaud both their technical achievements and their principles.

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I agree about the quality getting much better, but the one thing I really miss with DDG is the Google Search Tools, and being able to narrow my searches down by date (last month, last year, last week), etc.

For technical searches it really helps being able weed out old content and solutions (old rails 2 solutions, etc).

I'm glad you said this, because it was the reason I stopped also. I'll give it another try at home.

However there are a lot of times at work where having search results relevant to me is essential. Since DDG is all about not being the search bubble, to use them all of the time, I'd have to change the way I worked to bookmark my projects and search for my blog entries in the blog's search bar instead of just using the omnibox in Chrome (that is using Google) for everything.

Reason #2 is that search advertising helps pay for the GMail service that I rely on. I don't want to go back to my cable company's email accounts. Yuck. Terrible spam filtering and much worse webmail UI.

But, I'd like to stop using Google as much as the next guy. I'm waaaay too reliant, and I'd be surprised if the U.S. hasn't infiltrated their employee ranks, along with other countries, for greater influence and access to data than is even currently known by congress. Using Google is like living in a whorehouse.

With regards to your email: I recently switched from Google Apps (free tier) to Fastmail.fm and the transition has been pretty seamless. The interface is snappy and decent looking, and importing all of my gmail over IMAP worked well. On the other hand, I now pay a yearly fee for my email. The fee is fairly nominal (~$40/year for a mid-range account), and my money ensures that Fastmail doesn't need to harvest my content to keep the lights on.

Thanks for the advice, but I don't know that I'd place all my eggs in a basket affected by the politics and distance of the Federated States of Micronesia.

That's the problem with domains these days. Yay we're using a Libyan domain and whoops (remember- they took it offline http://readwrite.com/2011/02/20/what_happens_to_ly_domains_w...). io - British Indian Ocean Territory: same deal. People aren't thinking.

Yeah I think that's a very valid point. Thanks for the link -- was an interesting read :)

EDIT: Just as an aside, Fastmail is operated by Opera and runs on many domains that they control. For example, their IMAP and SMTP servers are messagingengine.com.

So, a US Govt owned domain. Remember Lavabit? Your email host is not good enough, unless it's, at least, your own. Then you have a whole host of new problems.

If you're not aware of it already, you might want to keep an eye out for Mailpile, which should have a bunch of the features of GMail (web-based, labelling, spam filtering) while being open source and allowing you to run it yourself (I'm sure hosted versions will pop up as well).

You can make the Omnibox use DDG.

Many development related queries seem to come back with undesired results in DDG where Google would come through but for most of my queries DDG is certainly doing a good job.

And I love the spartan results page I get back. It's easy on the eyes.

If you're going development related queries, I strongly suggest taking advantage of the !bangs and searching the official documentation first.

Being limited to only the jquery docs vs. googling until I found a random stack overflow question that I could copypasta helped me improve as a developer.

The reason for this (and the main reason I despise DDG after a month of using them) is that they only show one result per site, regardless of relevance. Stack Overflow being what it is, limiting sites of that kind of quality/focus to a single result is frustrating.

Hopefully someone will tell me there's a way to fix that, but limiting sites to a single result is a poor design choice. And forcing me to think "maybe this site has more relevant related pages" and act on that thought doesn't work, because I prefer to scan the results DDG has already given me.

Do you know about bang searches to search specific sites? "so! <your query here>"

Interesting. I always used "!so <query>".

Embarrassed. I didn't know about this. Thanks everyone!

Funny, Google returning too many results from the same domain was the primary thing that drove me to DDG.

I've also travelled the same path. I do like that there is no filter bubble[1]. Unfortunately sometimes it would be best if they did take location into account - a search for The Greek (a restaurant in my home town of Santa Cruz CA) gives me results that aren't close to useful. Fortunately a !g added to the search term fixes that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble

If you know that DDG doesn't have a filter bubble, why don't you just append your search with "santa cruz"?

Because I would expect geographical answers to take location into account. Also the towns around here all run together so knowing exactly which one to use is quite hard.

Using Google for well over a decade means I am used to typing as little as possible to get results. Filter bubbles are more relevant to searches for BP, Egypt etc.

"Because I would expect geographical answers to take location into account"

Then why are you using DDG?

I wish I could get into DuckDuckGo but I feel like in a time period where it's so important to optimize for Google using anything but Google puts you at a disadvantage.

People are goming Google left and right, so it's actually better for you to try and use a search engine that people are not gaming as hard, if you are looking for information.

I don't disagree with that. My main point is that the world Googles and if you're anticipating growing a business through search you're probably better off using it than not.

You are better off optimizing your website for Google, but not better off using Google for search yourself.

DDG has improved immensely with their search results though I still go on Google to search people by their names.

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