I first tried DDG years ago. It really wasn't great. The results and astetics were not up to snuff. I went back to google. About a year ago I decided to try DDG again. I've been using DDG ever since. Maybe once a month I'll google something. I use chrome only for google products like gmail.

DDG sucks and hasn’t really improved at all. I’ve used it for a longtime but I use bangs endlessly. Unless you can provide some quantifiable metric to prove its “getting better” then it’s delusion getting the better of you.

DDG uses other search engines for results (such as bing), so unless you agree Bing is improving, it’s just a placebo.

DDG is only useful because we can all fall back on g!. It’s sad but true. There is still no substitution for Google search.

> Unless you can provide some quantifiable metric to prove its “getting better” then it's delusion

This doesn't prove anything. Unless you can provide some metric to say it's not good, then it's delusion getting the better of you.

DuckDuckGo is good enough for everyday usage, for me. It has been this way for well over a year. I never use bangs.

Indeed, DDG usually gives better results for me because it second-guesses precise search terms less than Google, and because its instant answers from sites like StackOverflow are high quality.

The one place it's really currently lacking is in rejection of spam sites.

To me, it comes across like a skewed, disproportionately-negative cognitive distortion, of what I won't speculate because I won't armchair/keyboard psychoanalyze.

Back the fatalism FUD truck up from going off the cliff with baseless, whiny negativity...

DDG is so good that I use GOOG maybe once a year as a secondary search engine. And I started with GS since it had a comically-terrible interface in 2000. I switched because they went evil and DDG was more than good enough being privacy-focused. The !bang searches are a big innovation and timesaver that sealed the deal.

That's kind of how I feel about DDG but am concerned that they don't offer the privacy they promise since they aren't open source and are hosted on AWS. Feel free to try something I created....jivesearch.com. You can get all the !bangs they have.

I'd argue that bang searches are enough of a feature that it's worth switching anyway, even if you end up falling back on Google.

I've been using DDG for ~4 years now. Haven't ever used a google bang and it never failed me.

I find you have to train yourself to use DDG a bit. For example when I'm searching something JavaScript-centric but is a language agnostic concept, I have to prefix it with "javascript" whereas Google can already guess the context. On the plus side It helps you stay aware of the world outside your own! I find DDG's hashbangs incredible useful e.g. `!bi whales` (bing image search: whale) when it doesn't deliver.

DDG not guessing JS is one of the features of DDG. Google puts you in a filter bubble and shows you more stuff related to what you already know.

How could DDG ever be as good as Google, which has a profile of large parts of your search history (even if you're not signed in)?

And DDG supports the "g!" search prefix that allows you to easily open Google when DDG results are subpar.

I use DDG as default search for little over a year now. Mostly I am quite happy with it, and do not have to fall back to Google.

But for some searches I do have to do that. E.g. searching for a HN discussion from the last week: usually no hit. Also image and video search yield surprisingly little results. This last thing is my biggest complaint on DDG.

For HN specifically, !hn usually works pretty well in DDG.

This will find HN {stories,comments,both} from last week: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s&sort=byDate&type={story,com...