3 ms·

I'm in the same position I tried (default search in all browsers for a month) but found that I was using a !g on virtually every query. Eventually I just gave

by randlet 13y ago

I'm in the same position I tried (default search in all browsers for a month) but found that I was using a !g on virtually every query. Eventually I just gave up and went back to Google.

dredmorbius 13y ago
My suggestions: ⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months. ⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).
- NigelTufnel 13y ago
  I'm sold. For the next week (or couple of minutes if DDG isn't for me) I'll use DDG instead of Google.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. But it's damned good. Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory. DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list. I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
  - smonff 13y ago
    As @dredmorbius told, you should seriously read about the !bangs to exploit it in better conditions. That's fun to read.
  - grimman 13y ago
    It took me a solid week to wean off the worst of my habitual falling back on the GOOG. Then another couple of weeks to double check the results side by side when I didn't find something on DDG that I fully expected Google to find for me (they didn't deliver either). In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.

by randlet 13y ago

I'm in the same position I tried (default search in all browsers for a month) but found that I was using a !g on virtually every query. Eventually I just gave up and went back to Google.

dredmorbius 13y ago

My suggestions: ⚫ Stick with it. DDG's improved hugely in the past 12-18 months. ⚫ Report your problems to DDG. I've done this in a few cases, and have been stunned to get personal replies in a couple of days. Try getting that from Google (without landing three stories on the top of HN for a day or three).

NigelTufnel 13y ago
I'm sold. For the next week (or couple of minutes if DDG isn't for me) I'll use DDG instead of Google.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  I'll be the first to admit it's not perfect. But it's damned good. Hitting Google is a "!g" away -- just prepend / postpend that to your search and hit enter, you'll get Google's results (as I've noted elsewhere here: I usually try "!sp" first, as it's close to, but not quite, Google. What I noticed in my first weeks was that usually the initial results were actually very, very similar, if not identical. Since DDG has the same search syntax ("site:example.com" restricts to a domain or host, "quoted words" are searched together, (either|or) will do booleans), if you're a Google search power user, it's all familiar territory. DDG's information and support pages tell you a lot, and the !bang search syntax is very much worth knowing about. If you want to search !so (stack overflow), the bang syntax is great: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html There are things DDG doesn't do, which I've also noted. Date-restricted searches and localization are two of the big ones. I don't avoid Google entirely, but it's way down my list. I did enter into this with the mindset of intentionally taking a choice that's not Google, and that I'd have to make some compromises, but that I'd get better privacy as a result. The compromises really have been few, and I'm saying that as a long, long term Google user (since 1998) whose been increasingly disturbed by the company's direction.
- smonff 13y ago
  As @dredmorbius told, you should seriously read about the !bangs to exploit it in better conditions. That's fun to read.
- grimman 13y ago
  It took me a solid week to wean off the worst of my habitual falling back on the GOOG. Then another couple of weeks to double check the results side by side when I didn't find something on DDG that I fully expected Google to find for me (they didn't deliver either). In the end it's definitely a huge adjustment.