I still for the most part would put site:reddit.com or site:news.ycombinator.com into the google search bar. Mostly out of muscle memory, habit, and speed. If I need to use other tools to find something, its because google has failed.

On a similar note, Google deranking Wikipedia (which used to be the first result for like half of my searches) makes it so much less useful. I now need to add wikipedia to my searches.

With DuckDuckGo as your default search, you can use "!w" to direct a search to Wikipedia, "!g" to send it to google, "!gi" for google images, "!a" for amazon, "!ais" for archive.is, and a lot of other options.

If you're using search as a shortcut to get to some other service, it can be nice to go straight there instead of sifting through whatever garbage has been SEOed to the top of Google.

Perhaps more relevant to the GP, you can use !r to search reddit and !hn to search HN:)

Those are two examples where I might not do it because the built-in search on reddit and HN are worse at finding things than searching the same site through Google. For wikipedia search though, no reason to put that through Google.

> I’m wondering how long it will take for large companies to realize that people are gradually adapting and starting to look for information on sites other than Google search bar.

Hopefully it will take them a very long time. I don't want companies to start poisoning online communities with their hidden advertising. When I visit an online community, I want to read about the real thoughts of real people that are hopefully much smarter than I am, and maybe even post a few of my own. No community wants paid members with ulterior motives and conflicts of interest.