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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).
!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.
However, once you start querying very specific things, it tends to fall apart. Just today I wanted to see if the a particular company utilizes any Machine Learning and searched for company-name machine learning. No top hit contained all three keywords or anything related to AI. On Google the top hit was a company research institute and contained all 3 keywords.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiger
Recommendations: animals, military, people, movies, bands, organizations, technology, ... with a pretty picture, a subtitle, and a short description.
Top results: Wikipedia, Tiger Direct (a shop), WWF, Defenders of Wildlife, Tiger Woods, Detroit Tigers (baseball), ... (infinite list.)
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tiger
Single recommendation: Tiger (Animal), with a pretty picture, the life expectancy and the scientific name.
Top results: Tiger Airways, Wikipedia, Tiger Stores (a shop), WWF, Tiger Direct (another shop), Defender of Wildlife, ...
Special results "in the News": Tiger Airways, Tiger Woods.
I've been happily using DDG for almost a year now, but I still use `!g` regularly because it does get confused sometimes (point is: no search engine is perfect, but DDG makes it easy to redirect your search elsewhere.) I switched because google was pushing g+ too hard, experimenting with the presentation, customizing the result list based on my profile, and it was breaking my flow (like the popup "make google your default search engine", I get why they do it, but it required unwanted attention.) Somehow DDG convinced me that they would be less invasive.
But it does have a much nicer UI, and there are lots of searches that it does about as well as Google. For programming stuff, the !bang searches are nice (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) -- I can type "!mdn createElement" or "!php obscure_function" and get straight to the official docs.
For broader topics, DDG's Wikipedia preview is a nice feature, the row of embedded images across the top for famous people is handy, and for everything else, I find the search results to be more readable than Google's.
So unless Google have started to do browser fingerprinting, which I don't think they have, that shouldn't be the answer. At some level I believe that Google is just better at understanding my request, regardless of how poorly I formulated it, while DuckDuckGo just returns pages where some of the word match. Given that I don't know how any of the two search engines work I may be completely of.
Google clearly uses these logs to "customize" your search results, even when you check the placebo button to "disable" your history in the google account options.
Not having an account (or deleting local history) doesn't matter much, as they reconstruct a PK from all the entropy your browser leaks. (see their recent "we already ID your browser" reCAPTCHA update that no longer shows a scrambled image)
Harder to tell for Google Search - unlike YouTube I never see any indication that search results are based on my history, so any manipulation that's happening is opaque (I never search while logged in, so I don't know if the behavior is different in that case)