[Safety1stClyde]

I've been using DuckDuckGo for about a year without ill-effects. Although sometimes I have to go to Google, often when the results are disappointing I try !g and the results with Google are just as disappointing. It's also actually easier to switch to an image search using !gi than it is to click the image search with the mouse at Google's site.

[coolsdude2282]

I switched to DDG for the privacy selling point, but once I learned about !bangs I stayed. It is so much better done than any other site. Even if I had zero concerns about privacy I would still choose it over google or bing simply because of the wealth of query features that are so easy to use! I hate how google does queries and Bing is beyond useless.

[briantakita]

DuckDuckGo also has keyboard-friendly navigation. No clicking necessary.

[blauditore]

This is something that's been annoying me for years now. Keyboard navigation used to work on Google with Firefox, but stopped a while ago. It still works on Chrome, and by now I'm pretty sure they're intentionally not fixing/enabling it on FF - not sure why though. I don't see any reason other than pushing users towards Chrome...

[adrianratnapala]

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler.

I find google.com is more broken on Chrome than in Firefox. In firefox, it just just annoying moves the search field as you start type. In chrome you are not allowed to use it at all. Instead it forces you to use the location bar.

Sometimes the location bar does a Google search. Sometimes it goes to the URL you type in. Sometimes, other things happen. Occasionally the thing that actually happens is the thing you wanted.

[blauditore]

This only seems to apply to Chrome's default start page which looks like google.com, but actually isn't. It seems to work similar as in FF when navigating to google.com first.

[adrianratnapala]

It happens when I navigate explicitly to google.com as well.

But I think I have seen other behaviours in the past, so it all probably the exact Chrome version etc.

[qb45]

> I don't see any reason other than pushing users towards Chrome...

Well, I often get banners nagging to update to the "faster modern whatever Chrome browser" at googe.com. I really hate this bullshit.

[blauditore]

Update: I just found out it's related to the "Google Instant" feature, which was somehow disabled in my case - it worked in private mode, but not when I was logged in. Enabling it brought back keyboard shortcuts.

[rochellle]

DuckDuckGo isn't that great, but the !bang options make it easy to diversify, and branch searches to multiple targets, to compare outcomes.

Two things become obvious at that point, and the main one is that other search engines don't just customize search results to individuals, they actually spend costly human resources currating and QA'ing results. DuckDuckGo's search results kind of suck, and the reason they're not as good is because the results are not groomed to the same degree, by as many eyes, nor to the same level of quality.

The other obvious thing quickly noticed is that DuckDuckGo's !bang operators are so, so, so much more handy than some of the other horrendously mangled, inscrutable query strings you wind up landing on, that would require 5 or 10 clicks, navigating the intended user interfaces of the parent sites that actually host the results.

Compare using !googleimages on DuckDuckGo, to what actually happens when you click and type for results at https://images.google.com?

It's kind of silly that you can't just pass a query string to Google, and that DuckDuckGo does their query strings better than Google does for it's own product.

[oAlbe]

> DuckDuckGo isn't that great

Do you mind elaborating on this a bit? I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and, although at the beginning I would fallback to Google very often, now that changed. I still fallback to Google from time to time, but it's more to have a confirmation that, as parent says, the results are disappointing than anything else. Now I probably use Google after trying g DDG once in every 10/15 queries. It used to be one in three when I switched.

To be honest, I even find DDG to be way way better than Google in certain results. Programming related queries that would produce StackOverflow results are one example. And I'm not even considering the preview feature that DDG has that shows you the accepted answer to the SO question right in the search page.

One thing I don't like though, is the way the images and videos preview works (not in the image tab, in the search tab) on DDG. I find that row of videos/images to just be annoying since I would explicitly make an image search if that's what I needed.

That said, my experience now is that if DDG results are disappointing, there's a very very high chance that Google results will be disappointing too.

[petra]

Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ?

Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags.

On top of that, if you add easy help for search operators for each site(also crowd sourced), would be really useful.

I wish there was something like that for chrome.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lookpick-sear...

[jplatte]

> Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ?

Including !g in your search query simply redirects you to a google search with the same query (minus the !g). So you can set your search engine to ddg, then select the actual search engine by starting with a bang and whatever search you want. Some examples:

!gi - Google images

!gh - GitHub search

!w - Wikipedia

Starting a query with ! on https://duckduckgo.com/ also gives you autocompletion, so you can quickly discover what redirects are available.

[thinkmassive]

Chrome has built-in support for multiple search engines (many sites take the liberty of doing this automatically). You can customize the keyword that triggers each one.

For example, if you want to search HN you could add:

URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s Keyword: hn

Then you simply type "hn" in the omnibox, hit space, and enter your search term.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

[petra]

Sure adding your own is possible, or using some chrome extension like SearchBar, but having everything available, crowdsourced, and tagged, is totally different experience.

[robin_reala]

(!i takes you straight to Google Images)