

Your user agent - eksith
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=user+agent

======
Spittie
And this is why I've grown to love DDG. My last "wow" moment was when I needed
an ascii table two days ago. Searched for it and bam! it's right here in the
front page.

To anyone skeptic about DuckDuckGo: I've been there. But I've decided to give
it a week worth of a try some time ago (Google is just a !g away, anyway), and
it's been my default search engine for months now. You might want to give it a
try as well. Maybe you'll get hooked on the !bang syntax, maybe you'll get
hooked to the 0-click information box, or maybe you'll just switch back to
Google.

Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google, but I feel that it's
getting here. It's mostly lacking on queries about specific errors, and local
stuff. For everything else, I feel that I barely switch to Google anymore.

And, as a bonus, DDG works perfectly with Firefox Mobile. Google instead has
some problems (probably caused by some webkit-specific code).

~~~
logn
> Some queries aren't always on par yet with Google

I don't think google search is that great anymore. It's way too fuzzy of a
match. If you're trying to remember an actor's name or find some reference
with a vague query, it works ok. But google takes way too many liberties with
search results and is super focused on showing maps, reviews, and youtube
videos, and then results to alternate searches. Bing and DDG are better IMHO.

~~~
DanBC
Google is useful to more people, which means it's less useful to people who
are happy with things like the O Reilly Google Hacks.

There's some switch somewhere to force it into "Literal" or "verbatim" mode.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3239452)
[http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-
your...](http://insidesearch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/search-using-your-terms-
verbatim.html) (These are the posts that give me the '1 in 600 searches used
the + operator correctly' factoid.)

I think my current problems with Google are

1) Lack of predictability. I have no idea what terms might be substituted, or
what they'll get subbed for. I don't know what terms get stemmed or not.

2) Recentism. Google is great at finding things from this year. Finding stuff
from before 2000 is harder, and before 1990 is really tricky. (I don't have
any examples! Normally I keep them.)[1]

3) Desire to return many hits. I'm happy if I enter a search term and don't
get many hits. I'd rather have a few hits, rather than many hits that are less
relevant. I'd rather have a few really bad hits, and thus know that I need to
tweak my search terms, than get many sort of okay hits.

But for most people Google is great. Having said that, I switched to mostly
DDG and I really like it, except I'd like to be able to force a more English
(and not US) result cloud; and I'd like to be able to enter a term, have it
translated into other languages, and search for those. This would be a way to
break out of the English speaking bubble.

[1] I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even
though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time
limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches.

~~~
logn
> I find it weirdly hard to find minor news events from before 2000, even
> though they're online and covered by newspapers, even if I use Google's time
> limit settings. I'll start to keep these difficult searches.

Might be because the pages are updated after the publication date. I don't
know that google is able to find that type of structured info in each news
page. Actually a specialized search engine which is focused on date
functionality would be invaluable. Maybe someone like archive.org would tackle
that. It would be great to search even pre-WWW results, such as historical
archives or radio transcripts.

------
hawkharris
I wish that Duck Duck Go had more of these useful pop-ups.

I replaced Google with Duck Duck Go as my default search engine in Chrome a
few weeks ago, and the switch as a whole has been positive. The only things I
miss about Google are the instant suggestions for movies, timers, etc.

I still love Duck Duck Go, though (esp. the privacy benefits), and I'm sure
that they'll broaden their offering of instant pop-up results as time goes on.

~~~
jonemo
There's also
[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ascii+table)
which I use so frequently that I should really just print it out and tape it
to the wall.

~~~
myle
$ man ascii

~~~
unimpressive
$ man ascii | cat | lp -

~~~
_JamesA_
We have a nominee for the useless use of cat award.

~~~
unimpressive
Realized after I posted. Too late to fix it. The only reason I made the
mistake in the first place is that I wasn't sure if the pager would mess up
text output.

(What? You expect me to print three or so pages to test an assumption about
how *nix utilities work?)

------
anoncow
The thing I love about ddg is, it links to https versions of pages searched.
For eg. Google will link to non https version of Wikipedia results, whereas
DDG will link to the https version.

~~~
noct
The thing I love about ddg is they don't seem to do that horrible redirect on
some results that Google does.

I'll never understand why they do that; if you want to track links, send an
async post when I click, don't add an occasional multi-second delay.

~~~
evmar
It's because browsers are unreliable about delivering async posts when the
page navigates elsewhere. Some people proposed extending the web APIs to
provide a reliable mechanism but it was shot down by complaints of "tracking".
So now we're left with both tracking and horrible redirects.

------
voltagex_
How many people here just realized their corporate proxy is adding unwanted
headers in every request?

------
codexon
Somewhat related.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=ip](https://www.google.com/search?q=ip)

~~~
jlgaddis
Similar, but plain text and, thus, easier to parse, if necessary, e.g.:

    
    
        $ IP=`curl https://icanhazip.com/`
        $ echo $IP

~~~
nadaviv
There's also ifconfig.me, who returns either an HTML version or a plaintext
version depending on the user-agent, so `curl ifconfig.me` returns just the
plain IP. There's also a list of other URLs on the homepage (for the host,
user agent and a bunch of other stuff).

~~~
samuelkadolph
I've found ifconfig.me to be excruciatingly when I actually need it. Like
takes 10-30 seconds for a response just to get my IP. Sucks that someone got
the vanity domain and put a shitty server behind it.

~~~
voltagex_
Is there a reason you can't retrieve it via uPNP or similar?

------
malandrew
On this note, is it possible to completely remove my user agent entirely from
all my browsers?

I'd like to get to the point where the only identifying information my
computer gives out about me is information I give out about myself.

At the end of the day I shouldn't even suffer as a user because of this
because if sites are "doing things right" then they shouldn't be using the
user agent for anything at all anymore. They should be using feature testing
only.

Since it's been such a useless feature for so long, I'm surprised no browser
makers have gone as far as removing it entirely (I'm looking at you chrome and
firefox)

~~~
JohnTHaller
Disabling the useragent may break some stuff that many sites still do server-
side.

Disabling referer may break downloads and images on many sites. You'd think
they'd all be able to support blank or non-existent referrers, but many large
CDNs only support whitelisting specific REFERER strings (not blank ones).
We'll be turning referrer blocking back on for one of my big sites shortly
because we have other sites linking directly to file downloads (of 60MB and
up) and hotlinking images.

~~~
sdoering
Yes. For example, it disables graphs in Google Analytics. They do not work, if
your useragent is empty or if it is Googlebot 2.1 ;-)

------
Wingman4l7
User agent headers always uneasily remind me of this:
[https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

~~~
barking
Is there no way of preventing your browser supplying enough information to
uniquely identify your machine?

~~~
icebraining
NoScript can prevent most information from being gathered, but unfortunately
"no information" is actually pretty unique.

Using Chrome on Windows with Flash and Java installed is probably the best way
to blend in the crowd and make yourself less unique.

------
misterjinx
This made me to switch to DDG (for the second time) as default search engine.
I'll give it more time now, I didn't know about all these "goodies". For
instance, I just searched for a youtube link and it offered me a box with a
link to the wanted video and also the possibility to play it right from there.
This is so cool :)

------
Igalze
Love DDG but discovering your UA on SERP like that isn't very useful. If
you're someone who needs to know your own UA, you`ll probably need it several
times a day or more. Searching for "user agent" is the long way to do it,
there are browser extension for that. Still, nice Easter Egg from the best
Duck in town.

------
JackpotDen
I love the bangs on DDG.

arachnids !W (wikipedia)

a train !lyrics

jambi !grooveshark.com

northernlion !YT (youtube)

just shove it in the address bar. no waiting for tabbing or hoping google gets
it right.

------
bttf
Just want to share that VIM keys for up and down (j/k) work when selecting
search results.

------
riyadparvez
What are we supposed to see here?

