I agree completely. In fact I'll also say that when I first switched I used the !g pretty often - maybe even as much as 20%-30%.
These days I rarely use !g - the results have improved considerably and the bang searches are a very clever way of not requiring me to change search engine to search another site specifically.
I use !g more than I type standard queries, but I use !g once for every hundred times I type !yt, !w, !gh, &c. The proper search results are sometimes inferior to Google, but the bang queries make it more useful for me regardless.
!bang is the most useful search feature since I'm Feeling Lucky. I submitted this exact feature to Google years ago, and DuckDuckGo's implementation of it caused me to switch search engines.
It depends on what I'm searching for. If its an error code or something a bit esoteric around tech then google usually has better results, but for everyday topics the results are pretty decent, and they feel like they have improved over the years.
I probably do less searching than I used to, but the bang system really helps me search other sites much more effectively. The more common bangs I use are !w for wikipedia, !so for stackoverflow, !imdb, !gh, !tpb, !bm for bing maps, !bi bing images.
As pointed out by the other commenters you need a slightly different approach to search terms since they don't build a profile of what is and isn't relevant to you.
That said, it's definitely a lot better than a few years ago. I'm the same in having tried it back then and I couldn't get many useful results. I've been using it for half a year again now and only occasionally do I use the "!g"-bang to revert to a Google search.
I've moved to using it as my default search provider. I'm using it well over half the time and if the results aren't great I add !g to the end to get google's results.
Out of curiosity, did you make use of the g! keyword to cause a search to use Google instead? That was what made the transition easy for me. My search then consists of doing an initial search, and if the results look poor at first glance, toss a g! in front and see if it's better.
I've been wary of Google for a while now, and this is further proof my wariness is justified. However, one thing I can't seem to kick is using Google search as a fallback.
I use DuckDuckGo or Brave search for most of my searches, but half the time I have to add "!g" to the search to switch to Google to get actually useful results. Does anyone have any tips or tricks (or search engines I'm unfamiliar with) so I can break free? I know Bing is technically an option, but I'm under the impression it's not much better than Google (privacy wise) and their AI integration is off-putting.
Bang searching is obsolete as far as I'm concerned. For any bang search I can think of, I'm confident that I can just search Google for the same keywords (without the bang) and still get the result I wanted. If I search for a movie title, I get IMDB in the top ~3 results, if I search for a product, I get Amazon results, etc.
Same here. It’s not perfect but most of the time I know roughly what I want to find and visit websites directly anyway. Sometimes I use !g to use on Google instead if I think that Google will provide better results.
Yes, the search results aren't that good, but they're good enough. A single search almost always gets what I'm looking for on the front page or the entries immediately visible, which is impressive considering how little DDG knows about me.
Add in the !bang feature for searching most websites (classics like !w - Wikipedia, !g - Google, and stuff like !gh - GitHub, !aur - Arch User Repository) and my favorite "define X" keyword that links straight to Wordnik, and my search experience is better than Google.
The !bangs also function as bookmarks, so if I ever want to go to GitHub, I can just search !gh and it'll take me there. It's like having a set of search engines stored universally, accessible from any device with web access.
And of course if I need Google, say for word etymologies, it's just a !g away.
Can confirm, not worse than Google. I do still use !g to use Google occasionally, but as often as not I'm disappointed in the Google results.
It's quite refreshing to have lenses for specific types of searches (programming, for instance) and be able to set up URL redirects (reddit -> old.reddit, for example).
I try to wean myself off Google search every few months but I've never managed to stick. What do you like for an alternative? I'm probably due another attempt.
It's been my default search engine for years now and it seems to be fine for me, even with highly-technical searches. I'm resorting to !g less and less, and most of the time I don't get better results from that, either.
I think all of those !bang searches above work just as efficiently as is (minus the bang of course) for me in Google. I'm not switching to some new search engine anytime soon.
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