I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end (but you can add it anywhere) and it automatically searches the same thing in Google.
Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:
- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.
Note that the comments regarding indexing should be attributed to Bing, the underlying search engine that DDG uses currently. I too switch to !g occasionally when searching particular niches.
> - indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al. should have something similar...
One problem with this approach is that Youtube's search just feels so bad (at least compared to what you expect out of Google) and what's worse, they limit the number of search results. So you get around 10 somewhat related results and then they just instantly stop and you get some "you might like these videos as well" results. Frustrates me to no end and I think there could be a great opportunity in somehow indexing videos properly and creating a search engine around it. Then again you'd think Google would've done this but maybe they aren't able to. But in any case I'd prefer an endless stream of semi-related videos compared to their 10 results.
> I have been using DDG for roughly 2 years now and I always search for things technical or non-technical there first. If it does not give any result or when I know it's very technical I simply add !g to the end
I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
They claim:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:
- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.