3 ms·

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.

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.