It may depend on your particular field of search. I have been using DDG for quite some time and pretty often I need to use !g due to the low quality of the results on DDG only to realize I'm presented with equally bad results from Google. It's possible that for my regular searches DDG is good enough, and the more targeted ones are just too difficult.
I've been using DDG for years. Always hear about how it's so bad compared to Google, but that's definitely not been the case for the searches I do. I suspect it's heavily contingent on the types of searches you're doing.
From my view, I think it must depend on your use case and common searches. I've been using DDG for years now without any major qualms on search results. For my purposes it finds what I need, and for the few cases where it doesn't (perhaps 1 out of 50 searches?) it's easy enough to just add on a !g to my query to use Google instead.
I've used DDG as my main search site for a few years now. Every once in a while when I don't find what I want, I try !g and lately I find that Google didn't find anything usefully better. So now using !g is more like a last resort before giving up rather than an expectation that it will really help.
I switched to DDG a while ago and while I do occasionally add !g to my query, I can count on one hand the number of times that it's actually helped. Usually if DDG doesn't give me good results, Google doesn't either.
DDG can give downright weird and irrelevant results, and sometimes (rarely) even returning with "noting matched your search". I hate it, but I have to fall back to Google quite often, and the results are consistently better; sometimes much better.
I still have DDG as the default because it does work a lot of the time, and because it's easy to turn a search in to a Google search with !g, but I have to admit it's not all that good in comparison :-( To be honest I'm not sure if I would keep it as the default if it didn't have !g, and that's not a good look for DDG :-/
(I appreciate this is a very hard problem btw, so not even intended as a dig at DDG; just my experience with it)
This is where !g comes in handy. In my experience how you search ddg is a bit different from how you search google and it may require some time to get used to but for me what ddg offers is far more interesting than what google does e.g. consistent results, privacy, ability to forward my search request to other search engines.
Well, sometimes what you're used to matter too. For me DDG is better (expect for local searches, in which case I've got to include my city's name).
Every time I search anything in someone else's computer (with google) I find it much harder to find what I'm looking for, sometimes I can't find and just go to DDG.
The only times I use !g is when I find some pretty obscure programming errors and no (useful) results on DDG, and only once in a while google is able to find anything better, usually the results are the same.
You may be in a trap of selection bias here. True, sometimes !g reveals much better results, but one uses it only when not satisfied with DDG. However try to Google some queries that DDG does fine and you will see Google's results can be worse for some queries.
This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.
I've been using DDG for a while now as my primary search. I've found it does a much more literal searches, but doesn't always interpret the intent of my sentence as well as Google does.
I find myself using the !g at times when I can tell that the search didn't work as well as what I've seen on Google, but it's become much less frequent.
Disagree. I use DDG because I'm frustrated with Google search results. And granted, sometimes Google is better, so I just add "!g" to my query and let DDG redirect me to Google.
It seems people have a pretty mixed experience here. I trialled DDG for several months back in 2019 but switched back to Google after I found myself using !g for almost every search.
DDG is super super bad. I don't know why people recommend it at all. Now that you mentioned !g I remembered all my DDG experiments... 1) change my default search engine to DDG, 2) use it for some time, 3) use !g in half of my searches, 4) use !g in all of my searches, 5) say "fuck it" and switch back to google
I use DDG, and it works very well most of the time, but for some obscure and very targeted searches Google still beats it by a big margin (especially since Google has time filtering and etc.). So in such cases I just add a !g :)
Really? I've been using DDG exclusively for a few months, and whenever I get unsatisfactory results, I retry with !g. Invariably, I get equally unsatisfactory results with Google. Maybe in some rare cases where I'm searching for something esoteric, Google will return an extra page or two, but that's not very frequent.
When is the last time you used DDG? I switch about a year ago. I've used the !g trick 3 times when I didn't find what I wanted, and in all cases google didn't find what I was looking for either.
I can't speak for you, but I find DDG is good enough to replace google for search. Is google better - maybe, but not enough to overcome their downsides.
DDG is my default search engine, I do find myself needing to occasionally throw in !g if I'm not finding what I'm looking for. Results are generally decent though, and the trend seems to be that they are getting better and better (though I have not objectively measured that in any way). The other ! shortcuts are worth reviewing, as they can dramatically improve the results if you're doing a focused search.
Perhaps we are searching in different domains or have different expectations but I haven’t had the same experience. I use DDG as my primary search engine but very often I end up adding !g to get to results that are usable and it’s to the point where for a lot of things I !g straight from the start.
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