YMMV though, maybe I need to step up my searching game to obtain better results using DDG. That's definitely something I should work on.
Yeah, I had the same exact feeling a couple of month ago and created this [0].
Searching for my username on DDG returns an entire page of results on "glanders", a "contagious zoonotic infectious disease that occurs primarily in horses, mules, and donkeys". I don't find anything related to my name until page 2.
Runnaroo, however, has my GitHub profile as the first hit and my person website as the second. I like those results!
"I'm surprised I've never heard of this."
It is only a couple months old, so not many people have heard of it yet, but I have been trying to make an effort to share it more vs. just staying behind the computer and adding features. It did get a nice bump recently when Brendan Eich tweeted out a link to it. That was a really cool surprise.
"Runnaroo, however, has my GitHub profile as the first hit..."
I'm also working on adding Github right now as a Deep Search source, so the below results will soon be integrated into the SERP for that query.
But Google search is noticeably much, much better. They've got us over a barrel.
For stuff that doesn't matter too much, or is an easy search, i use DDG, then fall back to Google if i don't find what i need. For anything serious, i just open up a Google tab :(
Every time I search anything in someone else's computer (with google) I find it much harder to find what I'm looking for, sometimes I can't find and just go to DDG.
The only times I use !g is when I find some pretty obscure programming errors and no (useful) results on DDG, and only once in a while google is able to find anything better, usually the results are the same.
I wonder if the difference has to do with variations in search strategy or interests, or a combination of both. In any case, DDG does seem to have been improving, and I don't see any reason to believe that the trend won't continue. Particularly since Google seems hell-bent on making their search useless.
The dark scheme is also quite good.
I mainly use it for '*.countrydomain' to get results for a specific country.
DDG is mostly Bing under the covers for organic results, so most of Bing's advanced [0] searches will work in DDG.
Edit: Interestingly enough I can't get the 'IP:' operator to work in either Bing or DDG.
sadly, it doesn't work with .something, so 'inurl:.co.uk' doesn't seem to work. Works with 'co.uk' but that's only valuable with longer suffixes. something like 'uk' is a bit too common.
Appears to work?