[catchmilk]

I really tried giving DDG a chance but I always found myself having to go back to Google to find the right information. This would especially pertain to technical matters. The 'average-joe-browsing' (e.g. amazon, movies, songs etc.) worked fine, but when it came down to research papers or solving software problems, I was too often left disappointed.

A couple of weeks back I switched to Qwant[1]. Privacy focused, technical-matters-friendly, and most importantly, haven't had to look at Google once. Really enjoying it so far.

[1] https://about.qwant.com/

[scalableUnicon]

You could add !s before your search query to get Startpage results(google results without tracking) for that query. See the complete list of bangs here: https://duckduckgo.com/bang_lite.html

[pojntfx]

Just prepend `!g` if you use DuckDuckGo and want to have a Google result. It's super simple ;)

[newscracker]

You can put the bang commands anywhere in the query — in the beginning, in the end and anywhere in the middle. Startpage (!s) is another option to get results from Google without directly connecting to Google.

[dorkinspace]

Thanks for this tip! I have a feeling DDG supports many more bangs than I (and most people) know about.

... 13k+ bangs available. Yep!

https://duckduckgo.com/bang

[karinakarina]

FYI: With Startpage's Anonymous View feature you can visit search results in privacy.

[asdff]

DDG is nowhere close to google scholar, much less pubmed. If you don't want to use google scholar, web of science is good too.

[gcthomas]

I find it easier to access GOogle Scholar via DDG with !scholar than I do with Google Search.

[asdff]

Am I missing something with that flag? when I do that it just redirects to the google scholar results. I'm therefore nto sure the gain of going to duckduckgo.com and having to type !scholar before every query instead of just scholar.google.com

[UncleSlacky]

I use !gsch for that.

[slazaro]

!gsc is even shorter!

[dredmorbius]

There's also Microsoft Academic search: https://academic.microsoft.com/home (!msacademic)

[Softcadbury]

Qwant was based on bing a few years ago, but I don't know if it's still the case

[realusername]

It's a mix of Bing and their own crawler depending on the queries.

[mouldysammich]

Having taken a look at the privacy policy, it looks like it does still use bing as well as its own results.