DDG is still bad, though. I use it out of principle, but whenever I'm doing a deep dive into some technical topic, DDG fails me badly. I almost always have to just search a second time on Google. Google may corrupt the top results, but DDG often doesn't give any relevant results.
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 has basically equivalent results for most things, but I find that I use !g for programming stuff enough that I've gone back to just using the Google site for those searches. It feels like Google has better results for more recent programming topics.
I use DDG for most things, and being totally honest, it's not quite as good as Google, but it's pretty acceptable. Occasionally I'll try the same search on Google, and sometimes it's better. Not always.
I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.
How strange, I've been using DDG for a few years now and only rarely do I need to go to Google. Do you have examples of searches where Google is definitely superior (just out of curiosity, not challenging the notion)?
You're right, nowadays DDG is really not bad for satisfying everyday web search needs. On the other hand, I cannot help but switch to Google (g! at the end of the query) for anything programming related because Google just finds things that DDG doesn't.
That's been my experience as well. Also, searching for information on a very specific phrase (e.g. an error or an API method) doesn't yield best results for me.
That's why I was happy to discover !g , as it allows me to google when I need to, but still use DDG in the searchbox.
DDG has improved substantially recently. I've had some technical search queries that gave me 2-3 results on DDG, and when I used the !g bang to lookup in Google, I got a "no results" page. =P
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 the last few months. It's okish but sometimes I feel like I don't see the results I expect to find, I google them on Google (do you see what I'm doing? there is a reason for that after all) and I find them.
This is even more true for technical searches in my job (web development, mostly backend.) Google finds the answer, DDG less often so.
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.
Yeah, I use DDG by default now, and only use Google for hard searches – and even then, I'm continually surprised by the frequency of terrible search results on Google these days.
Comes and goes for me. On an average technical search these days I'd say DDG is easily equal to Google and on the rare occasion I still have to switch to Google.
For programming related things (in general, everything non mainstream), I find ddg to be nearly unusable and I always have to go back to Google. The results I get on ddg are almost always only in the general area of the search terms, while Google gives me specific results that are relevant and helpful. Sadly that's why I can't switch as much as I want to.
My problem has been DDG consistently produces worse results than google for many/most of my searches. It's often sufficient, but often it is so bad I have to redo the search in google :-/
I really want to use DDG over google, but it's just not there for me yet.
nowadays, i get different results for those specialised searces, but they aren't better. i much more rarely bother with google now.
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