Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine • Hacker News Board

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#121

Post by Zuider » Fri, Jun 14, 2013, 10:26 PM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #118

Zuider wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Please don't tell me it's evil. I am a little confused by your comment - has the word "enormous" come to mean "evil"? If so, maybe this new came about from people referring to the "enormity of a crime". It seems to have followed a similar etymological evolution to the word "gross" as in "gross depravity". But both words just mean "big".

The word "enormity" means generally "evil": The state or quality of exceeding a measure or rule, or of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous. (1913 Webster). It's not a general synonym for "enormous" or "having vast size", except by confusion.

Wow. Maybe it is an American English usage. In British English "enormous" is always used as a synonym for "huge", never for "evil". In fact, a quick google of the word revealed the former usage to be the more prevalent one. For instance, there is a famous children's story called "The enormous turnip" (adapted from a story by Tolstoy).

http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/Enormous-Turnip/Katie-Dayne...

Obviously, the children's story uses "enormous" to imply that the turnip is very large, not very wicked. Somehow "the dastardly rutabaga" or "the heinous swede" makes a lot less sense in this context.

Edit: Admission - I used DDG (my default search engine), not google.

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#122

Post by Zarel » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 5:46 AM UTC

Zuider wrote: post #121

dredmorbius wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The word "enormity" means generally "evil": The state or quality of exceeding a measure or rule, or of being immoderate, monstrous, or outrageous. (1913 Webster). It's not a general synonym for "enormous" or "having vast size", except by confusion.

Wow. Maybe it is an American English usage. In British English "enormous" is always used as a synonym for "huge", never for "evil". In fact, a quick google of the word revealed the former usage to be the more prevalent one. For instance, there is a famous children's story called "The enormous turnip" (adapted from a story by Tolstoy). http://www.boomerangbooks.com.au/Enormous-Turnip/Katie-Dayne... Obviously, the chil…

That's not what he's saying; he's saying that "enormity" isn't a synonym for "enormousness".

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#123

Post by Zarel » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 5:50 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #61

Legion wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more than "slightly different". By all means, try and replicate this complete list in your Chrome browser: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html . I'll wait... What makes the DDG !bang system awesome is its enormity. You don't look up what !bang to use to search something. You assume it exists, do it, and 99% of the time, you're right. That's a game changer. I don't write Perl, but I know !cpan exists. I don't even h…

You don't have to replicate the list. Why would you want to? If you've visited a site before and it has a search box on it that matches some heuristic, it gets added to your search engine list. Odds are, far more than 99% of the time, you're going to be searching a site you've already visited before. I agree it is very handy.

It's actually a standard, not a heuristic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSearch

If the search box is nonstandard, you can also add it manually by right-clicking the search box and clicking "Add as Search Engine".

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#124

Post by pilooch » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 6:25 AM UTC

ippisl wrote: post #100

pilooch wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably none yet, unfortunately. Seeks is usable because it relies on Google or any other engine in the background, when no results are available among peers. Yacy is more advanced, uses a DHT, but does not really work for daily use, the accuracy being too low. Unhosted is distributed architecture on top of the Web really. I've mentioned it because it may be useful and/or an inspiration to whoever interested in thes…

I've tried to download seeks, but it's linux only. This makes it much harder to build a large user community and to develop a decent business model.

Right, one way is to share one instance with someone you trust (and who runs a linux server), and to use it remotely.

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#125

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 10:05 AM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #23

OK, but tomorrow when I've forgotten that I've done this and I do a quick search, if the very first thing that comes up isn't what I want, I bet I switch right back.

then you type !g after the query (or before) and it sends you right on your way to (https) Google.

Making DDG my default search is the best thing I've done for improving my browser search capabilities. Coming from Opera, I'm already in the habit of using a great many custom search engines, which is nice if you're in Opera, but then Chrome feels very empty. Making DDG the default search gives me just about all of my custom search engines (and more), with pretty intuitive keywords, without having to configure and sync every browser on my system.

ever since ~2-3 years ago, Google is only very rarely my first stop in searching, I so much prefer to go directly where I want.

biggest part of the reason was their second-guessing my query and their results deviating more and more from a simple AND-query over my keywords. it felt like someone replaced my filet knife with a butter knife. (the other part was their instant search result updating and other "enhancements" were super distracting to me).

the only times when I go straight to Google (by which I mean prefix !g to my query), is for a few typical "local/Dutch" or "commercial/consumer" searches, you get a feel for what Google would answer better. Those types of queries are exactly what Google has been optimizing for the past few years, at the great cost of their general and precise web searching quality.

(PS, tip for the Dutch HNers: '!wnl' searches the Dutch Wikipedia. No you don't need it often but when you do, it's nice to have it quickly. I couldn't find it first because I always had it keyed to 'wn' myself, which sends DDG to a weather search site or something)

Re: Make DuckDuckGo your Chrome default search engine

#126

Post by tripzilch » Sat, Jun 15, 2013, 10:15 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #43

hkmurakami wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that having the !$var shortcuts to all sorts of sites (including !g for google, !w for wikipedia, and single word strings for many lesser trafficked sites) has made me more productive than a plain google search bar where I often need to add an extra click to the workflow.

As is usually pointed out in these threads, if you're using Chrome anyways, you can do the same thing (and with the same bang syntax, if you want to go to the bother of customizing them that way) with the location bar in Chrome. Start typing the web address, hit tab, enter the query, and it just goes straight to wikipedia, google, etc with no DDG intermediary. It's slightly different, but you can do almost the same t…

I've been doing that for years (Opera was first with this functionality), but simply being setting DDG to the default search versus having to configure all those different keywords, saves me SO much time.

If it was just my desktop, and for some reason it only had one browser, okay. Customization is always cool. But I use too many different computers with too many different browsers in too many different locations that DDG's !bangs makes this really convenient and portable, getting the fast browsing workflow I'm used to in just a few clicks.