I'm the other way around, I only have to use !g for 1 out of 5 searches (Google still does a lot better when searching technical topics).

Although I DO get frustrated by DDG's image search. Google's actually takes you to the actual image URL, so it's easier to get a link for sharing. DDG shows all images through their weird proxy thing, such that you can't easily get the raw URL.

To get the raw URL in DDG image search, click on the image and then click "View File". This sends you directly to the image itself.

That’s odd, that’s not been my experience at all. I’ve been using DDG exclusively for probably 4 years now. I rarely use !g.

In my experience, I've been using it for a few years now and I've maybe used !g 4 or 5 times total in the past couple of years. I find the performance of image searches just fine myself. So it's always fascinating to see that people report such different experiences with DDG.

It's hard to know for sure what's happening though. Maybe my searches are just very simple and don't need anything complex? Maybe I'm luckier and always have fast internet connections? Maybe it's some other factor I'm not thinking of? Who knows without trying to come up with a more systematic way to compare things.

I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.

Same, I think it might be something psychological like being used to the Google page.

It's pretty easy to replicate my problems with image search and I suspect what the problem might be.

They have a proxy (just like google) so they don't directly load the images you search for, they make their servers load the images and then send you a proxified version. If you search for obscure terms, they won't have a cached version available so they will have to request it from the actual server, and that makes all images take a while to load. On the other hand Google always keeps the images cached so they can serve them instantly.

When as that? Because I had the same experience of constantly using !g a few years ago. Decided to try ddg again around 6 months ago and it's gotten a lot better imo. Rarely use !g anymore and kept it as my default engine since.

Sometimes ddg results are even straight up better. Most of the time I use !g is when looking up location sensitive stuff, e.g. non-english local government stuff etc.

I had similar experience, at least in my case, I think it is just due to being used to Google. Most of the time I issue !g (when DDG results aren't that good) Google also gives not much better ones.

Weird, I haven't found their image search slow. I just wish I could search by usage rights.

Also, I suggest using !s instead of !g so that you still get Google results without actually being redirected to Google.

Same. Its fine.

What is this !s and !g notation?

I had no idea. This changes everything for me

Try Bing for images. Again not as good as Google, but a whole lot better than DDG -- in terms of search results, that is. In terms of speed, I think Bing and Google images are on par.

Not sure, no problem here, images load almost instantly. Searches are find, maybe a few times a week I use !g because ddg didn't find what I was looking for

https://duckduckgo.com/bang If you don’t know what !g is