As DuckDuckGo has become better, it also seems that Google is becoming increasingly worse, at least with general searches.
Interestingly enough where Google shines is finding pages that I sort of know exists. Queries where "I know I saw this on Stack Overflow" or "I've seen this exact text somewhere" and localized searches (Although DuckDuckGo have become a lot better recently).
Well, they are in your browsing history, and Google knows it?
!yt for youtube is useful too, as is just ! for I'm Feeling Lucky and !wiki,!define.
This is the main reason I began DDG, so useful, faster than using a drop down or looking for the relevant site on Google. Not sure if other search providers do this, but I also appreciate the privacy aspect of using DDG.
I have g for Google, gl for feeling lucky in Google, w for Wikipedia, imdb, yt, and many more I never use.
Consider a "wide scope" search: "how to write a modular app in ruby". In such cases, most of the times the results in the both the search engines are very different. See DDG: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=how+to+write+a+modular+app+in+ruby... and Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+create+a+modular+app+...
Also, for images, you will have to go back to Google. DDG image search is simply not good enough. And DDG often pops up images in search results when they are not called for (and those images are mostly useless), which is kinda annoying.
It's fine for basic searches but the results really lack when it comes to any kind of technical query.
Unrelated: I hate that DDG doesn't show dates, which I find invaluable for many of my searches. Is there any way to show those in DDG?
For the cases when it doesn't, consider !sp for Startpage: "the world's most private search engine. (enhanced by Google [results through proxy])"
or !iq for "Ixquick"
[0]: As in, it impersonates DDG so I can use it on my phone when I am on local wifi, but DDG when I'm not—my raspberry pi is both a DNS and HTTP(S) server.
DDG is definitely not for everyone. My parents tend to search Google by entering questions into the search box, and Google does a great job at working out what they mean and want, while DDG is IMO a much more literal search (as in, are the words you typed in the page results).
And yes I'm using it in daily life.
Using DDG. I pretty much always forget that Google is an option nowadays.
Also, their redesign is the first in a while that I actually prefer over the old one. Aside from the hamburger menu (and, yecch, sort-of-half-floating title bar) it's much better,
https://startpage.com/eng/company.html (also look at the logo here)
https://www.ixquick.de/eng/company.html
And both introducing new redesign
Are they tracking referrers from DDG, or what?
Quick test of that: https://www.google.com/search?q=google
Yeah, the box shows up if I click that in Firefox, even in private browsing. You'd think they could make it show up on the homepage when clicked from Yahoo, which most Firefox people would probably do if their default got changed. But anyone who uses DDG probably did it on purpose.
So, if I can't find anything in DDG (usually very specific), I'll just type !g at the end, and it'll take me to Google's search engine (encrypted version).
If I want images, I use !bi or !gi.
The bang ! is pretty much the most powerful feature that DDG has.
