It gets tiring quickly and I find easier to append !g instead of clicking the regional toggle button.

Google automates, DDG leaves me to choose. I prefer the 2nd approach every time.

This is exactly why I like DDG way more than Google and why I love to use Alfred instead of Spotlight on my Mac. With DDG you have !bangs and with Alfred you also can tell him what you’re looking for. 99.9% of the time I know I’m looking for a file or a folder or a definition of a word or want to open an app or want to search the web etc. With Spotlight you’re stuck to the order Apple designed the results to show up

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

www.google.com/ncr

'ncr' here stands for no country recognition. It allowed many expats to do technical searches without the noise of regionalization results.

Of course someone clever at google figured out that was probably too useful and now it just redirects you back to google.com because screw all those niche use-cases.

When you were in a different country (e.g., India), and you typed in google.com out of habit, it would recognize your IP-geo and redirect you to the country-specific domain (e.g., google.co.in).

If you really just wanted google.com for whatever reason, then you'd type google.com/ncr. It then wouldn't redirect you based on your IP-geo, and you'd stay on google.com.

In other words, google.com/ncr _always_ redirected you back to google.com. Then, and now.

However you can see from the comments in both android police [0] and reddit [1] that, irrespective of your assertiveness, the behaviour did indeed change at least in 2017 if not more times before.

It at the very least used to preserve the suffix and absolutely respect no regional results. It's the same as the old bolean operators, google claims the behaviour is unchanged but will silently ignore them.

[0] https://www.androidpolice.com/2017/10/27/changing-googles-do...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/google/comments/4xda1p/googlecomncr...

Sure, give me local results if I don't specify anything. But let me tell you if I want results in English now.

You don't have to. DuckDuckGo allows [0] to create a link with settings: https://duckduckgo.com/?kl=jp-jp.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/settings

I also search in Spanish (Castilian), but sometimes I want results from Latin America, sometimes from Spain.

Being able to set the language/region is of incredible help in both cases. There is no way to automatically detect this.

In DDG it's usually the first page.

I still do a lot of !g when I search technical stuff, as it lets +word -word and DDG doesnt find a lot of weird github issue pages, old forums, usenet posts sometimes.

I'm a bit lazy right now to remember all the problems it has, but some of the most obvious are looking up for news on recent events (especially something small, stuff that doesn't appear in reuters and these sorts of media) and trying to find out some basic stuff about local shops and such (of course, I only know about how it feels in my location, not worldwide). On both occasions I pretty much always use "!g ..." right away, because DDG is just clueless about this shit. Google does this just fine (in fact, sometimes it's even impressive: there are thousands of cities like mine, yet Google can often tell me where I can buy some stuff I'd have no idea where to look for).

This is exactly correct. Excluding poor local search results (which is understandable bc of the privacy aspect), Bing/DDG has trouble with long tale search query relevance (5+ word queries), and also finding results from small or obscure sites. The later is simply because Bing's organic index is not as large as Googles.

Bing/DDG's organic results are still very good, but they are not as good as Google's in the above specific circumstances.

My mother wanted to access Amazon last week and typed "my amazon account" in french in the windows search, which searched for those terms in Bing. One of the first (paid) results was a scam site triggering alarm sound, fake virus notifications and asking her to call a scam hotline.

At least DDG filters out the ads but the problem in this case is Bing's OS integration.

The last time I did a comparison, Bing did better (I don’t know what DDG does with the Bing results exactly, everyone says they just show Bing results, but no one knows and it simply doesn’t mesh with my experience).

Because Bing does not randomly filter out half my terms while DDG does even for "-forced terms. This is my #1 problem with DDG and I complain about it in pretty much every DDG thread (while otherwise loving DDG).

For few result searches, DDG shows you essentially random stuff even if they have the result I want (which can be tested by searching for an exact sentence from the result page). On the other hand doing the search on Bing gives me the result without neutering my query.

Edit: typos.

For your use case, simply append !g to the DDG search and it will do a Google search instead.

I just searched for "lockdown rules for SA" (I'm in South Australia and we just had a new 20 person cluster, so we are going back into lockdown).

On DDG the first results was a Guardian article which was good, but then the rest were a mix of South African articles and blog spam. There were no SA Gov pages on the first page of results.

On Google the first result was the South Australian gov site with the rules, the second was the Guardian article, then more SA Gov pages and at result 8 I got a South African result.

https://searchengineland.com/google-reaffirms-15-searches-ne...

BTW, when I perform the same search, Google's first result is "What Are the Lockdown Rules for South Africa? A Guide for ..." and all the other results on the first page are about South Africa too. (Note: I'm in Japan)

Everyone in Australia uses "SA" - this is one of the reasons why location based context is important.

> You don't need the "for" either.

I worked on consumer search for a few years, and on text based search word like "for" are helpful to get exact match. Even if the term frequency of "for" on its own isn't particularly useful "for SA" absolutely is. (And these days with neural ranking using sub-word parts it is even more useful).

Searching for "lockdown rules" "sa" (together) just now gave a bunch of South Australian specific results with the "Australia" localisation setting enabled.

With the localisation setting disabled, all the results were indeed about South Africa instead.

https://www.enca.com/news/sa-lockdown-strick-international-t...

So at least they are trying to to location based results.

Now, even with quotes, I routinely get a whole first page of results where my terms are not included anywhere. Google generally respect the quotes.

I hope that a verbatim search function will be restored in the future; I think it's an essential basic tool for a search engine, and without it the user can be left with the impression that the engine either doesn't understand what it is being asked to do, or that it is wilfully disregarding instructions because it thinks — often wrongly — that it has a better idea of what the user is searching for than the user does.

I thought the whole point was to improve over time, not get worse. :(

(No, I do not consider typing "!g" before any search that contains quotes a solution to the problem.)

Google does infer purpose better, and if someone is looking to buy something, it does well there too.

Ddg is very good at info queries and the more one uses it, the better it is.

What they could do is exactly what google did and that's to review those uses and improve.

But what they have right now is solid, given just a tiny bit of work.

If anyone is thinking of making the switch, you can always redirect your searches to Google by throwing a g! in the query.

I wonder if this is generational or cultural?

Personally, I dislike trying to interface with a machine using natural language, because I know it can’t really understand me, and I’d rather read and interpret the results for myself than have an algorithm pick the “best”.

I actually find speaking to machines (e.g. automated phone systems, Siri etc) using natural language quite embarrassing, as if we were pretending that real life was like Star Trek.

Until we address meaning, my statement remains solid. And it can often be easier to treat the tool like what it is rather than figure out how to best pretend it is something it is clearly not.

Although such queries are habit forming and now google does a decent job understanding the actual question

Got good at including words for context early on and never stopped.

My default remains word searches. Frankly, better operators would benefit me more than questions would.

I really do not always want to formulate a question. Doing that makes sense sometimes.

Often, I want to see relevant info, then formulate other queries.

It also sucks at retrieving very new information.

And I say this as someone who set DDG as default.

I mean, you do seem to be DDG’s ideal user. You searched for mostly technical issues, and a hot political issue.

Still, for really niche topics if search needed there is no way around Google. On the other hand Google is not the only way to explore the web, let alone auto-complete a url...

Other than that, I've been using [Runaroo](https://www.runnaroo.com) as well.