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I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is. My speculation is that it's all in how you se

I see this kind of comment pop up every time DuckDuckGo is brought up. It makes me wonder what the disconnect is. My speculation is that it's all in how you search. When I first started using Google, I learned how to craft my search precisely to get the exact results I needed. More keywords, filtering based on the site(s) that I might want, etc. Years later, this influences how I search considerably. In contrast, most people I know who use Google tend to use much looser terminology and Google gets it roughly correct regardless. When searching for more obscure information I can generally outperform them but otherwise they're getting 90% of the way there As a result my searches on DuckDuckGo haven't given me any worse results than Google would give me. If anything, they've gotten better (even setting aside bangs)

noahtallen 6y ago
Part of the issue for me is that what I’ve learned from searching with google for so long might not translate to DDG very well. A real-world example from work recently is the query “vertical flexbox animation css”. In DDG, 0/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. They are just generic flexbox documentation. If I search the same phrase with google, 4/5 of the top results are about animations and flexbox. And I would think that CSS is a relatively popular technology compared to some things I could be thinking about! This happens to me with so many queries throughout the day, that I often end up using !g whenever I have a technical-ish query because the top results are usually a lot more relevant. Maybe you are right, and I just need to phrase that better, but most permutations of that string don’t return much clearer results.