[vixsomnis]

Yes, the search results aren't that good, but they're good enough. A single search almost always gets what I'm looking for on the front page or the entries immediately visible, which is impressive considering how little DDG knows about me.

Add in the !bang feature for searching most websites (classics like !w - Wikipedia, !g - Google, and stuff like !gh - GitHub, !aur - Arch User Repository) and my favorite "define X" keyword that links straight to Wordnik, and my search experience is better than Google.

The !bangs also function as bookmarks, so if I ever want to go to GitHub, I can just search !gh and it'll take me there. It's like having a set of search engines stored universally, accessible from any device with web access.

And of course if I need Google, say for word etymologies, it's just a !g away.

[JoshTriplett]

> Yes, the search results aren't that good, but they're good enough

It took me a while of using DDG and looking at results side-by-side before I could reliably distinguish between "results aren't as good" and "results don't feel like Google results".

For example, I kept track for a little while of how many times I had to use !g. I changed my DDG theme for a while to use colors similar to Google, and found myself using !g less often. That has disturbing implications for just how conditioned I was towards Google search results. (These days I use the default DDG theme.)

Apart from that, I reported various minor cases where DDG's rankings needed fixing (many of which got fixed, with actual email from a human about the issue).

These days, though, I almost never use !g. In the rare cases where I get annoyed with a set of search results not showing me anything useful, I tend to find that Google's results aren't any better.

One area I do wish DDG would fix: showing calculations directly without having to use !wa. For instance, just today I searched for "2^64 picoseconds in years" on DDG, and that didn't instantly give me the answer; I had to repeat the search with !wa. Google gives the answer at the top of the search results.

[doubleg]

The full (searchable) list of bang-options: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

[joseraul]

Why does StackOverflow have 3 bangs (ov, sof, stackoverflow)?

[broguinn]

If you're looking for etymologies, !etym is a much better choice.

[cholantesh]

Just playing around with some of these bangs and I notice that !eo provides even richer results. On investigation, !etym seems to be performing an '=' comparison while !eo is a 'LIKE'.

[puranjay]

I like how the results aren't personalized.

This is a big problem when I'm doing some research. I don't want links from sites I frequent. I want links that actually match my query.

It's not my primary search engine, but I do find myself turning to DDG from time to time

[JoeAltmaier]

You hit the nail on the head. The 'bubble' factor is responsible for the different search results. They're not customized, so folks see them as worse. That's the feature I prize, and the reason I use DDG exclusively.

[uxcn]

I've gotten into the habit of using DDG as a default as well. I typically only search for keywords or similes that should be on the pages though, which almost any good index should be able to handle.

Google still seems to be lightyears ahead of everybody else as far as understanding actual content meaning and intent though. It's fun to try to give google a query it can't return results instantly for.

[uxcn]

s/simile/synonym/

[vhost-]

I use duckduckgo on my desktop and laptop by default, but the bang syntax is a pain on mobile so I set it to google there.

So far I'm pretty happy with DDG results.

[i80and]

I used to do the same thing on mobile, but a friend's project[1] adds some nice fat buttons at the top of DDG results for common !bang commands.

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

[annoying_tech]

I have a "!tpb" search on my bookmarks for that moments when TPB changes domain.

[morenoh149]

!kat kickass torrentz. even when the url changes.

[benihana]

I'm kinda confused about the bang syntax. Chrome offers something similar to that, that I use similarly. Their search engine shortcuts allow me to do very similar stuff. I alias wikipedia to wp and simple hit command/control+l then type wp and it searches wikipedia. Does DDG just route you to the site?

[josteink]

The bangs work any place in the string. They don't have to be a prefix.

In Firefox you have a dedicated search bar (ctrl-k) which remembers your search across locations. So you search for "heisenbug oracle ipv6" press enter and are not immediately happy about the precision of your search.

So you press ctrl-k again and append "!so". Bang, your previous search is now applied to stack overflow and you have your answer straight at spot 1.

It's a very good flow. It will never work in retarded browsers who insist on removing the search bar though (like Chrome, Safari, IE).

In a deeply misguided act of Chromeism, Firefox was considering going in that direction too, but the outrage in the userbase hopefully caused them to never venture that line of thought again.

[ninkendo]

It works the same way in the safari bar. If you use it to search, the search bar maintains your search string, not the URL. So you can use ⌘L on the search page, and your URL bar will be focused with the plain text of what you just searched, and you can append !g as yon would expect.

And copying the search text in the URL bar actually copies the link too, which is nice.

[rylee]

>It will never work in retarded browsers who insist on removing the search bar though (like Chrome, Safari, IE).

Uh huh. Because they'll lose their ability to tell if something is a search or a URL because of bang parsing, right?

[BuckRogers]

But the URL changes from a search string to the URL of the results. A dedicated search bar retains what you last searched for. For example mine has "league of legends !w" at the moment. If I wanted to search on Startpage for that I just hit ctrl-k and change !w to !sp.

[anigbrowl]

I suppose it saves typing, but I don't really mind doing site:news.ycombinator.com on Google.

[dublinben]

DDG has thousands of premade !bang shortcuts though. You don't have to spend any time creating unique search aliases for every one of your browsers. You (and anyone else) can directly search wikipedia with a quick !w from at DDG from any browser anywhere.

[tgb]

Chrome automatically creates these for me, though. Start typing imdb.com, once it starts autocompleting, hit tab, then type whatever I want to search. I only have to go search there once. I've been using firefox and DDG lately and I really miss this.

Down side to that feature is when you search a random blog once and then two years later it's suggesting you search there again.

[hansrodtang]

Firefox supports something similar, if you for example visit IMDb you can add their search via the Firefox search box and then add a keyword of your choice to use the search in the address bar.

Both Firefox and Chrome use OpenSearch (http://www.opensearch.org/Home) to achieve this.

[dublinben]

That sounds a lot like you're still creating each one yourself. Just because Chrome is suggesting that you might want to create a search shortcut, doesn't mean you're still making individual shortcuts by hand.

I can directly search Audible.com (a site I've never used before) with an intuitive !audible. Then I never have to think about this shortcut ever again, because it isn't saved in my browser somewhere.

[sesutton]

If you delete the suggestion by hitting Shift-Delete while it's highlighted.

[Nadya]

Thousands of premade !bangs that I would have to memorize, rather than create myself (which makes memorization much easier)

Although pointless, it's fun to use my keyword "ddg" to use their bang syntax to search another site. Even if I already have that site as its own keyword.

ie:

There is no difference between me searching "y this searches youtube" and "ddg !y this also searches youtube" or having to actually visit ddg to search Youtube. There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.

[shmerl]

You can create them yourself in Firefox if you want. See http://johnbokma.com/firefox/keymarks-explained.html

[Nadya]

Which is exactly what I explained I use (and why I would use them), but thank you. :)

>There's no reason for me to not just use a feature already built into my browser.

[morenoh149]

o.o it's intuitive imo. !g - google, !yf - yahoo finance, !cb - crunchbase, !news - google news, !yt - youtube. Sometimes I just try an abbreviation that makes sense and lo I'm correct.

Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.

[Nadya]

Sometimes it's about wanting a trivially shorter keyword.

!h searches Hoogle; I would prefer it to search Hacker News. To search Hacker News I have to use !hnsearch or !hn

!hn isn't much larger than !h but is still something I would prefer to set myself.

!m goes to Google Maps but I would prefer to use another map service. I could use !mapquest but would rather it just be !m

!sd goes to Slickdeals instead of Science Daily (which is !sciencedaily , talk about lengthy)

E:

I just compared my keywords and then searched the DDG Bang list for where I would be taken if I had used DDG instead of ones I set myself.

E:

>Plus I make ddg my default browser so I do just go to the address bar put `!yt cats` and get youtube cat videos.

I just type "y cats" and get youtube cat videos. ;)

[ahrs]

>!h searches Hoogle; I would prefer it to search Hacker News. To search Hacker News I have to use !hnsearch or !hn

>!hn isn't much larger than !h but is still something I would prefer to set myself.

>!m goes to Google Maps but I would prefer to use another map service. I could use !mapquest but would rather it just be !m

>!sd goes to Slickdeals instead of Science Daily (which is !sciencedaily , talk about lengthy)

It sounds like this is a prime use case for text shortcuts such as those built into OS X or Textexpander etc…

Just create a shortcut to transform '!h' to '!hn' or '!sd' to '!sciencedaily'.

[oalders]

There's some good stuff in there. If you're searching for Perl documentation !mcpan will lead you directly to a MetaCPAN.org search page. "!mcpan Plack" is a good example.

[anthony_romeo]

It also helps that even if you don't know the shorthand that, say, !py3 does a search of the python3 documentation, almost always you can type out the full name to do the search, e.g. !python3.

[nsxwolf]

Doesn't using DDG with Chrome negate the privacy benefits? Doesn't Chrome just report everything you do within the browser to Google anyway? I always just assume so while I'm using it.

[glitchdout]

If you are logged into Chrome and use `!g`, yes. You can even check it at https://history.google.com/history/

In the past that page would even discriminate searches made with DuckDuckGo. They recently redesigned the History page to fit their Material Design look.

I would hope that when I'm logged out, Chrome would not track me... And what about Chromium?

[hrehhf]

> I would hope that when I'm logged out, Chrome would not track me

There's several more settings under Advanced Settings -> Privacy: "Learn more" links to https://support.google.com/chrome/?p=settings_privacy

-Use a web service to help resolve navigation errors

-Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs typed in the address bar or the app launcher search box

-Prefetch resources to load pages more quickly

-Automatically report details of possible security incidents to Google

-Enable phishing and malware protection

-Use a web service to help resolve spelling errors

-Automatically send usage statistics and crash reports to Google

All of these send info back to Google and can be used for tracking even when logged out. Not to mention the usual tracking in any browser. And this is just what they are up-front about.

[yohui]

Currently, it seems only the first three plus phishing/malware protection are enabled by default. The phishing/malware protection is also used by Firefox's "Safe Browsing" feature: Firefox uses a local blocklist to check for potentially malicious sites, so you only connect to Google to update the blocklist and double-check when you actually run into a site on the blocklist; Chrome does the same.

See: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

Prefetch makes local predictions and connects to any site, not Google in particular AFAIK.

The omnibar prediction service uses your default search engine, so Google is only involved if you've left it as such.

So if you take the obvious steps of changing your search engine and signing out of Google, that leaves only the navigation error service. As with safe browsing, this appears to send URLs to Google only if certain local conditions are met.

[MacsHeadroom]

>Doesn't Chrome just report everything you do within the browser to Google anyway?

Yes.

[eli]

Well, no, Chrome does not report "everything you do" to Google. For example, it wouldn't report what you're searching for on https://www.duckduckgo.com/

[simias]

yeah, it's mostly the same thing except you still bounce on ddg's servers which sounds pretty silly but in practice it means that it'll work on any browser anywhere as long as you use duckduckgo unlike custom aliases.