4 ms·

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time

I've been using DDG as my primary search from desktop for several years now, and I find its results to be equivalent to or better than Google's most of the time. When I can't find something, I'll try a !g, but only rarely does that help any more.

bhrgunatha 13y ago
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.
Derbasti 13y ago
I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).
- protomyth 13y ago
  The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.
  - cerberusss 13y ago
    Yeah but DDG does this as well. Try searching for NSString. It'll actually search for strings.
    - protomyth 13y ago
      It seems to be all NSString for a while. Am I missing something?
- jmpe 13y ago
  For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. Same here. I used to have corrections for java -> javascript but that seems to have been fixed. Just this morning I tried searching for this: µC/gui button detach ... "detach" gets corrected to "remove" and "disconnect", resulting in useless links. The top 2 links are general features overview pages. Which is odd, because googling this: button detach results in lots of uncorrected queries for event delegation. You'd think that adding "µC/gui" would narrow the context, but no.
- lmm 13y ago
  I use an extension to always set google to Verbatim search results. It works very nicely.

bhrgunatha 13y ago

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.

Derbasti 13y ago

I totally agree. In the beginning, I was !g a lot. These days, I mostly !g for more natural language kind of questions. For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. "lupdate.exe not working Qt" transforms to "did you mean 'Update not working'?" (lupdate.exe is part of the Qt translation toolchain and Windows forces it to run as admin only because there is "update" in its file name. The Google 'correction' of that is perfectly useless).

protomyth 13y ago
The second huge fail of google with technical queries is when it starts substituting synonyms for words in your query the make the search useless. It makes you not want to name commands in a common sense style.
- cerberusss 13y ago
  Yeah but DDG does this as well. Try searching for NSString. It'll actually search for strings.
  - protomyth 13y ago
    It seems to be all NSString for a while. Am I missing something?
jmpe 13y ago
For more technical searches, Google has become next to useless for me. Same here. I used to have corrections for java -> javascript but that seems to have been fixed. Just this morning I tried searching for this: µC/gui button detach ... "detach" gets corrected to "remove" and "disconnect", resulting in useless links. The top 2 links are general features overview pages. Which is odd, because googling this: button detach results in lots of uncorrected queries for event delegation. You'd think that adding "µC/gui" would narrow the context, but no.
lmm 13y ago
I use an extension to always set google to Verbatim search results. It works very nicely.