I've switched to ddg for a while, and the one area where I find it really lacking in comparison to Google is that it is very poor in surfacing relevant hits from threads on forums or stackoverflow. Which is frustrating, as I'm almost more interested in results from there when looking up technical stuff than some spammy blog. It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.
But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.
I experience the same problem as a fairly novice programmer who doesn't always know the right term to stick into DDG/google.
>It's gotten to the point where I almost always automatically bang out to Google for those types of searches.
But this is why I stick with DDG, because it is very very easy to check elsewhere with a two letter bang. Even if I never used DDG search it would still be valuable to use DDG with bangs for wikipedia, google, youtube, etc.
It also coordinates very nicely with Firefox's search bookmark feature, I just start the keywords with ! and it's just like I'm doing a normal web search on DDG
Sure, but you have to configure it to do that. There are bangs for pretty much everything, and I can usually guess them easily enough. !wayback is a favourite of mine.
I’ve been using DDG for years, but sometimes i wonder if it’s just Bing with bangs. I haven’t exhaustively crosschecked this, but the results seem to very closely match Bing’s. They say they use results from a few engines. I wonder what the percentage per engine is.
Recently, at least, DDG has been surfacing lots of StackOverflow results for me, including the relevant snippets in the right margin that sometime suffice without opening the url.
I've used DDG for a while and my impression is that it seems worse than it's been in a while. I've been looking up documentation for some rust crates and DDG has been particularly unhelpful.
What prompted me to comment was trying to find information about the latest SARS-COV-2 story from Iran that had been published on SFGate.com. DDG was turning up news sites like: Infowars, Washington Times, Daily Kos, Zero Hedge, Red State, etc.
Google put the Guardian and WaPo front and center.
But it is amazing how much poorer Google results feel to me these days compared to from a few years ago. For most regular searches ddg does quite well and when I have occasionally banged out to Google for the same search, more often than not I've ended up preferring the ddg search results.