Re:The world needs more search engines
by buzzerbetrayed on Sunday December 01, 2019 @12:18PM
(#21676499)
I’ve tried switching to ddg a number of times in the past. Every time the same thing happens:
“This result isn’t that great. I’m going to !g just this once”
Then, one week later I’m adding !g to literally every singe search so I switch back to google because what’s the point?
I really do hope to one day get off of google though.
For me it helped to switch over my mobile browser in addition to desktop. It's much more of a hassle to type !g so I try to make do with ddg and only use !g if I really have to. After a month or so it seems like my choice of search queries has adapted to better make use of Bing's algorithms, and when I do find myself trying !g, half the time it results in even worse results.
I use StartPage.com which is based on Google but strips the private data.
"Startpage is now owned by an advertising company" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21371577
Re:The world needs more search engines
by heisenhuegel on Sunday December 01, 2019 @06:40PM
(#21678592)
Bangs are nice in DDG. In Cliqz, there is also limited support, but you have to put it at the end ("test !g"): https://beta.cliqz.com/
I will grant that Google has a more intelligent indexing and ranking of Stack Overflow. However, DDG is making major progress there, and I rarely need to add !g
Pro tip: with the bang shortcuts, you can add them anywhere in your query, it does not need to be in the beginning of your query string.