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I've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions. Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default

by mey 12y ago

I've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions. Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default search engine. If the result isn't great, I may rerun it with !g which will then forward my request on to google. Makes it really easy to migrated while still being able to fall back when needed.

gcb0 12y ago
I have one default search engine on each computer/device... drives me crazy most of the time. Yeah, google is still the best for SOME technical term. if it has too much symbols, yahoo/bing/duck are better.... but only so slightly. the scary part is that even google still being the best, technical terms results are becoming awful everywhere.
logn 12y ago
I agree with this. For programming issues I normally use !g to search Google. I suspect Google is better for programming queries because they did a lot of indexing of newsgroups, blogs, and StackOverflow. But for everyday queries, DDG works fine (and I prefer it to Google as I don't usually want to see Google Reviews/Maps/Plus links in the top 50% of the screen area... and I don't need to see results for alternate queries on the bottom 50%).
dredmorbius 12y ago
For technical questions, my first go-to is generally StackExchange (!so) or a site-specific search (w3.org is great for specific CSS spec queries which I seem to have been doing a lot lately) via DDG bang syntax. Google's my third choice.
jlarocco 12y ago
Agreed, but only for "real" questions. Meaning, if I just need to RTFM, DDG finds it for me. If I search for "Pymongo find function" it will return the documentation I want. If I'm having a problem or debugging something not explained in the manual, there's a slight chance I'll have to use !g and use Google. If I search for "Pymongo find function not returning all results while sorting" I might need Google. The number of searches where I've had to use Google has decreased significantly in the last year.

by mey 12y ago

gcb0 12y ago

I have one default search engine on each computer/device... drives me crazy most of the time. Yeah, google is still the best for SOME technical term. if it has too much symbols, yahoo/bing/duck are better.... but only so slightly. the scary part is that even google still being the best, technical terms results are becoming awful everywhere.

logn 12y ago

I agree with this. For programming issues I normally use !g to search Google. I suspect Google is better for programming queries because they did a lot of indexing of newsgroups, blogs, and StackOverflow. But for everyday queries, DDG works fine (and I prefer it to Google as I don't usually want to see Google Reviews/Maps/Plus links in the top 50% of the screen area... and I don't need to see results for alternate queries on the bottom 50%).

dredmorbius 12y ago

For technical questions, my first go-to is generally StackExchange (!so) or a site-specific search (w3.org is great for specific CSS spec queries which I seem to have been doing a lot lately) via DDG bang syntax. Google's my third choice.

jlarocco 12y ago

Agreed, but only for "real" questions. Meaning, if I just need to RTFM, DDG finds it for me. If I search for "Pymongo find function" it will return the documentation I want. If I'm having a problem or debugging something not explained in the manual, there's a slight chance I'll have to use !g and use Google. If I search for "Pymongo find function not returning all results while sorting" I might need Google. The number of searches where I've had to use Google has decreased significantly in the last year.