Plus !bangs they kept it useful for me before I got used to their search. I rarely !g nowadays and being able to quickly dip in and out of sites for specific things is great. Like a super ‘I’m feeling lucky’ with parameters.
I really like the "bang" searches they provide. I agree that their actual search results are not quite as good as Google's, but the ability to search the site I want straight from my browser search bar is brilliant.
!Bangs are great for when you need to find something specific or technical, which Google is much better at. I find this addresses most of my gripes for personal use.
!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.
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 that too. One of Bangs' advantage is it has suggestions, so I don't have to memorize all the keywords I've set. Of course, Bangs work with keyword search (e.g. du !amazon alice in wonderland), but you lose the suggestion.
In any case I mostly use keywords to search google, youtube, and wikipedia in several languages, so I don't see bangs having much utility for me.
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.
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.
I’ve actually found it mildly useful because I can use all the search engine operators to cut down all the shit and actually get a moderately specific query. It’s not perfect of course, but still way better than most sites.
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.
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.
I use it for my searches pretty regularly, I don't feel like i've lost anything, if anything the anonymous searches are more generalized. This lets me get out of my comfort zone sometimes.
I only use google with the site keyword helper now. For searching the net in general it's not entirely useless, but I haven't felt lucky enough to smash that lucky button in ages.
For me just the ability to filter/downrank certain domains and the ability to rewrite urls (universally, without having a separate plugin setup on mobile devices) is a very specific example of what I like.
Makes it easy to ensure that I'm always on old reddit and wikipedia with the better (older :p) layout. Also allowed me to clean up a lot of the results that I knew were from low quality domains, such as getting rid of pinterest since results from it almost never led to anything useful.
I also enjoy the lenses, I hated how the Google results for recipes tended to only make already frustrating recipe sites even more frustrating to dig through. The small web lens is also very nice for when I'm already searching for a niche topic.
Besides that, I also reflect the vague description of the search results seeming to be better.
And of course on top of that, there's the lack of tracking and putting my money where my mouth is regarding preferring to pay for a good privacy preserving service.
reply