I'd suggest spending some time learning DDG. It is a very good engine once you get used to it.

Another trick I use with Google, especially when I'm searching things that are outside of my usual interests, is clearing my cookies. Best I can tell, this makes it skip the statistical model of me that, say, suggests 'logging' is more about daemon output than about killing trees.

Now if only all the engines didn't have such a bias towards "new" material. My major search-related frustration over the last while has been how buried things become over time, especially if they share identifying lexemes with things in the news.

> I keep failing to find what I need on DuckDuckGo or it's kin and having to go onto Google

What's an example of a search that fails to find what you need?

There's been a dozen things I've tried to search on HN, for example, looking for keywords and there's literally dozens of other links with similar topics that prevents me from finding what I looked for.

Various programming questions. Don't have an example right now, sorry.

"intitle:duckduckgo site:news.ycombinator.com" and then further narrowing down by restricting to past year.

You can use "!hn duckduckgo" that usually works better.

I doubt that works "better" and certainly there is no bang for every site.

No, DDG often fails me too. Especially when searching for programmer things -- sometimes what I really meant to search for is StackOverflow.com + any "programming blog.

Search for programmers?

At the risk of sounding melodramatic, the internet is a great idea but the implementation sucks and there's no easy way to fix it.