duckduckgo w/ Firefox for personal things, and Chrome+Google for tech.
I find the duckduckgo search results for tech problems far inferior for some reason.
Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
31–40 of 61 posts
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#32Google, because when it comes to localized (aka non-US) content every other search engine pretty much sucks. That's why in Europe Google dominates the market with market share in search north of 90%.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#33DuckDuckGo, because it gives me the answers I seek (if I'm not satisfied, I'll throw in a !g, but the efficacy of that has declined over the past years, as DDG has improved). The one exception is Google Scholar, which is still unmatched.
Google scholar is indeed amazingly useful, but oddly enough for me DDG is what makes it easy to use. I have no clue how to get the scholar results from the google page. If I'm honest I don't even know how to access google scholar without using DDG, although I imagine I could probably figure it out if it ever became necessary.
Isn't it scholar.google,com?
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#34I used DuckDuckGo for years: it's really nice.
Since December 2017 I am using Qwant: it just works.
I am using them because I want to keep the Internet interesting and full of variety. For me internet is more than google and facebook.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#35Google, because when it comes to localized (aka non-US) content every other search engine pretty much sucks. That's why in Europe Google dominates the market with market share in search north of 90%.
Polish guy living in Chile, using DDG as a main search for something like 2 years ago now. on the occasion (once every week maybe?) I switch to Google (!g + search) if DDG doesn't give me good result, but with Google recently almost every time I have to switch to verbatim mode as normal one returns garbage...
rest od the searches are rather ok, but I'm mostly searching in English and Spanish. in the latter case I sometimes have to force local results (toggle in the search pageof DDG) as it returns results from different Latin countries.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#36Google on PC, DDG on the phone. I use an extension on Firefox to be able to view images directly and reverse search images on Google Images since they removed that feature. None of those extensions worked for Firefox Android, so I've just made DDG my main search engine there.
What's the name of this extension?
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#37duckduckgo because i love of the bangs !gh !npm !yt !gm but also !g sometimes.
For those who might assume that setting up custom browser searches is the same as using DuckDuckGo's !bangs - it isn't.
DDG's bangs work across multiple browsers (provided that DDG is the default browser), and it takes less time to just do that than to set up thousands of custom searches. It's much faster than using the site: suffix too.
For example, the Arch Linux wiki is simply !arch and naturally, !hn, !reddit and !twitter (or !tw) are also covered.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#38Bing, because it's good enough and it's not the Google monoculture.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#39DuckDuckGo. I went back and forth between DDG and Google a number of times before I managed to stick with DDG. I rarely go to Google at this point, only in cases where the search is extremely specific and it really needs Google’s omnipresent eye. DDG’s results have gotten a lot better in the last year or so and the !bangs are super handy. Meanwhile Google is experimenting tirelessly with AI that ‘corrects’ my searche…
I use DuckDuckGo because of infinite scrolling and the ability to navigate your search results with the up/down arrows. It's not privacy, but usability. It's insane that these features aren't built into every search engine.
Also I agree that Google is outsmarting itself in terms of guessing what users want. It used to be you could learn how to coax Google into giving good results, but its queries feel way less expressive these days because they're trying to be smart.
I'm better at learning the behavior of a stupid search engine than a smart search engine is at learning my behavior (for now at least).
I still use Google Scholar a lot though.
Re: Ask HN: Which search engine do you use, and why?
#40startpage.com as a proxy for Google results.