I really wish I could do this, but Duck Duck Go really just seems subpar when it comes to anything I actually still use a search engine for these days (technical searches).
A better solution for my use case is to 1) avoid search engines where possible (far easier than you might initially think) and 2) just use googlesharing with ssl to provide myself with some anonymity while using google.
That's curious because I really have been working hard to get it much better for technical searches, and I often get the opposite report (that it's better for those with integrated SO , less content farms, other zero-click & goodies). I guess it varies by specific type though. In any case, I'd really appreciate specific examples so I can improve!
I often search for Cocoa Touch and Cocoa class names to get at Apple's reference docs. XCode has them available offline, but this actually takes much longer than googling, and the doc viewer doesn't seem to support tabs.
DDG does fine for some of these (e.g. UIView), while some don't even list in the top 20-30 (e.g. UITableViewController). Google isn't 100% reliable for this either (Apple recently changed their URLs which probably cost them PageRank juice) but it's near enough. DDG is unusable for this specific pattern. I don't know if fixing it would adversely affect other searches, though.
A "!" bang syntax would be fine by me, if that helps. (that's option-shift-K on QWERTY I think)
One thing that would really help and guarantee that I use DDG over Google for this kind of search would be to keep your links to documentation pages up to date, or at least give an easy selection.
Google is really bad at this. For instance, most links to pages in the Apache docs on Google are for 1.x, which all have a big header that says "This is deprecated, use 2.x". I use 2.x so the 1.x links are annoying, and it would be difficult if Apache didn't provide a link right there.
Another example is PostgreSQL. Google has _always_ been bad at providing up-to-date links to the PgSQL manual, even now it's usually 8.0-8.2 results that come up (the current version is 9.0.x). It's annoying because Postgres doesn't have an easy jump-to-current link like Apache, so I have to go up to the address bar, delete the older version number, and replace it with my current version number or the word "current", which always points to the latest.
I know it would be hard to do this for general results, but for official documentation it shouldn't be too difficult since the URLs usually contain the version number in a reliable format.
So, if I searched for "postgresql grant", as an example, I would like recent results to come up, or at least an easy way to choose which version of the documentation to use before I clicked out. If I have to write "postgresql grant 9.0" or something similar that would be OK too. Google does poorly at this even when you specify the version number you want as just shown.
I switched back to Google because it performs significantly better on technical mathematics searches, which is mostly what I look for. On computer programming searches DDG and Google seem to do about equally well. On some domains I wouldn't be surprised if DDG does better.
1. Poor interpretation: "distribution of compact support" brings up nothing very useful in DDG -- a bunch of linkfarms, it looks like -- but in Google the third result for me is a relevant .pdf from Oregon State.
2. Users attempting to ad-hoc convert math notation into ascii: Google understands "l 2 space", but DDG thinks I mean "l2space" which is some sort of gallery in I don't know where.
I think this actually homes in on one of the bigger issues with setting up a competing search engine, you have to be equal to or better than the incumbent all the time, and that is really hard.
The use of familiar everyday terms for technical mathematical objects makes this difficult ("net", "space", "compact", etc.). Since most pages are either all about math or have nothing to do with math, I wonder if there's an easy way to tag the former pages, which would then be used as an advanced filter available when searching. ("Is this a math search?")
I find that DDG is great for finding most of the programming-related stuff I'm looking for, but if I need to find more recent information, it's starting to fall behind.
For example, a recent AVG update caused widespread boot failures on 64bit versions of Windows 7. Searching "avg windows 7 crash" in DDG (and some other variations) is not returning very high-quality results at the moment; the top couple of results are from much older issues, the next one is a couple of paragraphs from some site about AVG apologizing for the trouble, and so on. Google isn't a lot better, but at least its top result is a brief article from Computer Weekly on the issue.
The advantage for using DDG for technical results comes from its !bang commands. Need python code? !python. java documentation? !jdk. ruby? !rails, !ruby, !rubydoc, !rubygems. HTML? !w3c. When you already know where you're going to go looking (as it sounds like you do from "avoid search engines") then DDG becomes the portal interface to get quick access to them out of a browser.
I have found the opposite. For technical searches DDG really works well for me. The only reason I don't use it 100% is that I find Google's autocomplete very useful (especially for none tech stuff) in that it reduces the number of searches needed to find something.
Could you explain a little more about how you avoid using search engines? Do you just go directly to sites that you know and trust and use their search functionality?
More or less, yes. I have bookmarks to all of my prefered news sites and blogs, use wikipedia or imdb for most of my general knowledge searching, and most of my technical questions are answered by official documentation or source diving.
Is this mostly about saving time, saving mental effort, simultaneously finding tangential content, aligning with some ideology, or something else? Actually curious.
For the most part it's just coincidence and me trying to keep myself away from a computer screen. I try to keep what I do on the internet in a narrow purposeful tract, so that I don't spend more time on the internet than I really need to. It just so happens that the things I really need the internet for rarely involve search engines.
I do use googlesharing just on principle, but that's pretty much the extent of my ideological reasoning.
A better solution for my use case is to 1) avoid search engines where possible (far easier than you might initially think) and 2) just use googlesharing with ssl to provide myself with some anonymity while using google.