Hacker News Reader

Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

I find duckduckgo quite usable for commonplace CS things such as programming in popular languages. For more obscure things I usually just enter g! [query] into my URL bar, so it will revert to an anonymous google. I find this better even just for the fact that I don't get the filtered down view of the world anymore - if there are things named similarly than the ones I use in the world, I want to know, so I can adjust my own naming.

View on HN

Really? I tried to use DDG, I really did. But the results are just so subpar unless it was a simple "navigational" type search where I knew exactly what I was looking for. I really want to quit Google. I'd even pay for it. But they just dominate by such a large margin.

Have you tried https://startpage.com ?

DDG results have greatly improved over the last year. I tried switching from Google to DDG a couple years ago, but didn't last more than a week. DDG results are as good (and nicer looking) than Google for general searches, but I still rely on Google for needle in a haystack searches.

Yeah, I doubt that DuckDuckGo could compete with PageRank in its first iteration.

There is a reason that Page and Brin are billionaires: their algorithm was absurdly clever.

In my usage over the last few years, I've come to rely on StartPage for good search results (since it's a proxy for Google). While DDG has improved over time, it still is nowhere close enough to be a Google replacement for me. I end up doing searches on DDG only to repeat the same on startpage.com to get better results. DDG still does not have time based search (where you can search for results in the past day, week, month, etc.), which is a huge disadvantage for me.

I do use both StartPage and DDG, although it's more like a 80%-19% split between these two. The remaining 1% is still on Google to get things like news, and Self-Destructing Cookies [1] helps keep things clean on that front.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

What are you talking about? Totally lost after the first sentence here.

DuckDuckGo has a 'bang' feature, where you add a bang like '!g' to search a different site directly.

For example, '!g hacker news' becomes 'https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=hacker%20news'.

https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html

Sorry, I understand that part. Was wondering what you meant by this (specifically the part about a "filtered down view of the world"):

"I find this better even just for the fact that I don't get the filtered down view of the world anymore - if there are things named similarly than the ones I use in the world, I want to know, so I can adjust my own naming."

It wasn't a loaded question or anything, not sure why I got down-voted either... (shrug)

Google gives you a "filter bubble", essentially exacerbating confirmation bias. That way if you search "what's wrong with Python" it won't return "snakes can hurt you".

Take a look at http://dontbubble.us

ah I gotcha. thanks for the link.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com