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I Used DuckDuckGo for a Week and Had to Switch Back. Here’s why.

• dorfsmay 13y ago
  > google is faster I wonder if DDG slowness is due to its sudden popularity in the light or PRISM. I have tried to use DDG several times in the past, I went back to google because I found the results to be more relevant, but speed seemed to be an issue in pre-PRISM days.
• schrodingersCat 13y ago
  I use ddg because of their hacker-centric features like a nice python api, !bang search, and their "goodies". Plus their plugin allows you to add their 0-click results to google searches. I agree, google is a better product, but I've found that I only have to use them supplement my searches. ddg makes it easy to do that. I just add "!g" in front of my query and my search is sent to google. They are definitely a work in progress, and I cannot wait for their product to mature.
  • OafTobark 13y ago
    Are there instances you've found where bang search isn't covered by Chrome's built in site search?
    • schrodingersCat 13y ago
      Yes. For instance, if i wanted to search for ways to compute a cross product in python, i could just type in "!numpy cross product" and directly search the numpy project page for an answer, without having to first navigate to numpy (I could also search stackexchange by "!sx"). I'm not saying this replaces the features of chrome entirely, but I have found it helpful for my needs. YMMV...
• Yaa101 13y ago
  As far as I know, I could be wrong, DDG is a Bing proxy. For that matter, there are also Google proxies, I like to use Ixquick in https mode.
  • schrodingersCat 13y ago
    This is partially true. I read that ddg does get a lot of its content from bing and other providers, but also indexes some content on its own. Ixquick is its own search engine but ixquick's "startpage" is essentially a google proxy (this is probably what you meant) but also includes their own content in search results.