Not just spell check but Google understands natural language queries, too, better than duck.com.
Ex A:
https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=the%20movie%20wher...
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=the%20movie%20where%20...
If I know that I am searching a YouTube video, I usually search directly on youtube.com. I use Firefox search keywords for this, I just type "yt Rick Astley Never" in my top bar and instantly see the results. Pretty sure Chromium et al. should have something similar...
I am the same, but i default to !sp (startpage.com) first.
They claim:
> You can’t beat Google when it comes to online search. So we’re paying them to use their brilliant search results in order to remove all trackers and logs. [...]
But yes, i know. I still use it, because i trust those guys to have a good-enough judgement on this. https://blog.privacytools.io/relisting-startpage/
Maybe they're not perfect, but i'm convinced they are a hell lot better than submitting my data to Google. ;)
Some examples of things I personally thing DDG could improve / is different then Google:
- DDG gives the feeling they prefer wikipedia over stack overflow. Stack overflow ranks often second.
- GLSL shaders. DDG does not index websites such as shadertoy. Example search for "Gold Noise Uniform Random"
- indexing Youtube and other videos. It takes up to 2 days before new youtube videos show up if you search for a video. Example a mcdonalds burned down in my city a few weeks ago so I searched for videos and photos. It did not find any videos only photos and articles. Google found a few videos including once on a dutch news website.
- Visual search and reverse image lookup is not that great. Only in Bing you can search for a video based on a image DDG and Google both can not do that. So both could improve that.
- DDG sometimes gives the feeling not enough people have searched for something, This feeling is more a feeling then a real thing. This is mostly because Google finds a lot of spelling / typo's in your search query and DDG appears to only repairs it until it contains valid words. Example search for "A apple a day keps the", Google corrects AN and KEEPS but DuckDuckGo only corrects KEEPS.
- Old websites are not indexed that well. Example if you are developing a gameboy advance game it takes a while before you find Tonc (one of the best resources regarding GBA development). With google this experience is terrible as well but it takes less time to find some good things.