The bang commands alone are DDG's killer feature for me, and it's why DDG is set as my homepage and default search engine (and probably still would be even if I did have to !g every non-site-specific query).

So recently I got annoyed by DDG's "optimizations" (they are a lot more aggressive in ignoring words in your query than google and unlike google they don't even tell you about it; I know I can use "" to force a term, but !g is much quicker).

I thought I'd give startpage.com a try (proxied google results without tracking), but besides being slow I realized I couldn't live without bangs anymore (and was also missing DDG's rich snippets).

I wish DDG had some kind of bang that tells it that I actually want to search for the query I entered, not some random query they think I might have wanted :/

edit: I should mention that after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.

I've noticed this too. It's probably the cause of all of my returns to the anonymous Google search via !g.

Also ddg doesn't have anything like Google scholar. Thankfully just a !scholar away, and faster on a slow connection than going to scholar.google.com.

> after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.

Anecdotally, for every feature I’ve wanted of DDG, I’ve found an old post where someone on their team says they’re looking into it. For some I’ve found multiple posts, going back over a decade! Always the same “looking into it”.

I use DDG, but I put them in the category of companies too afraid to say “no, we won’t do that feature” or “we like that idea, but it’s low priority so we don’t know if we’ll ever get to it”. Whichever features they have, I use; the features they promise, I ignore.

I hope they enable it with a bang straight up

! this is exactly what I want

then a way to keep it enabled by default

Being able to choose a default and then switch on demand via bang would be the best solution :)

Bangs are truly amazing, my only disagreement would be in that I use !sp instead of !g as a fallback since they have a better privacy record. Other favourites include !m and !osm, but I should probably read up on even more of them.

Had no idea about these DDG bang features, although admittedly I've barely used DDG. Usually use startpage if I'm not using Google. I imagine to there also might be a chrome extension that does a similar thing to the DDG bang features, or are these just DDG-only search indexes?

They're just quick redirects to specific sites' searches, which work wherever DuckDuckGo would otherwise return search results. They make it really quick to search specific sites, or even to go directly to specific pages on some sites (without remembering the URL's exact syntax).

Try searching for “!w search engine”: DDG sends you straight to Wikipedia, which sends you directly to the relevant article. (Search “!bang” for more info about bangs.) When DuckDuckGo is your default search engine you can do this straight from your browser's address bar or OS's search field. It's very nice.

(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo; I just really like this feature.)

There are certainly Chrome extensions, but I don't (usually) use Chrome. And sure, there are Firefox extensions, but if I'm using some oddball like Lynx or Dillo or Netsurf, it's nice for such functionality to just be part of my search engine (which works on all of those browsers).

AbSOLUTELY ! Love the bang feature.

> when I'm on a browser that's google by default

Tip: Type ddg.co/somequery in the address field to quickly get back to DuckDuckGo

Tip: ddg.gg may be easier to type.

I usually get it wrong where to put the dot or how many d's and g's there are, so ddg.co is easier for me.

I use DDG, Google and Bing pretty evenly. Unsurprisingly each out performs the others on some searches.

Google generally has the best results but for 95% of searches they all find what I need.

My experience with DDG was the same when I used for a few month a while back. They definitely didn't exceed Google. When I try them once and a while, they still don't.

But thing is, Google itself seems worse and worse to me. It seems to try harder and harder to decide what I want and only give me that - if X is associated with something topical, only topical links appear. And DDG and Bing follow this problem.

I suspect that the eternal problem will be that of context.

Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative.

These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used.

On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.

Google has been personalizing search results, and going way beyond just "link counts", for a while now.

e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).

Sometimes Google doesn't personalize search results enough for me. I do some academic stuff in $FIELD, and sometimes (can't think of an example off the top of my head, sorry) the keywords for a $FIELD-related search happen to namespace-collide with something completely unrelated that I don't even think of until I try to Google the keywords and get a faceful of crap about vacations to Disneyworld or divorce lawyers or caring for your pet lizard.

Never happens with tech jargon though.

On DDG I also get the Python library as first and Apache Kafka as second result.

Google search for Kafka consistently gives me Apache Kafka first. It frequently then gives me some clothing retailer I've never heard of in second place (but not always -- at least one time, this was totally absent), with no indication that it's a "sponsored" result or anything. The Wikipedia entry for Franz Kafka is in third place; everything else is Apache-related.

DDG gives me a decent mix of results about both Apache and Franz (not only the Wikipedia entry, a variety of books/articles/etc as well).

but the frequency of reputable backlinks are perfectly suitable variable to rank a website's importance and relevance, and Google obvious knows how to discern garbage backlinks vs legitimate ones.

For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.