I've used DDG for years now. They give me the exact same results that Google does, all the time. And why wouldn't they when they're indexing the same web sites. Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all, and it's not like new websites with quality content have surfaced lately given the incentives. I don't even bother to cross-check Google's result anymore, something I occasionally used to do maybe two years ago.

That's interesting, whenever I search for anything programming related the results differ greatly and google always wins.

I actually switched to DDG cold-turkey and didn't use !g at all. Until I couldn't solve some problem and someone in my team said "it's the first result on google", I felt pretty stupid then. Since then I've given up and just automatically stick !g whenever I'm searching anything programming related.

> Full-text search isn't rocket science, after all

Full text search isn't, but ranking the results is - and more importantly there is no objectively best ranking.

Yes, and Google sucks at it.

I use DuckDuckGo by default but I probably add !g to redirect to Google 2/3 of the time. DDG seems to be a little bit worse about rewarding user-hostile SEO spam [0], but honestly the main reason is that with Google I can use [1] to block those domains. DDG is also still noticeably worse for vague or complex queries IME.

[0] When I search "postgres array_agg" on DDG - something I actually had to search for today - the Postgres documentation is the 6th hit (not even visible without scrolling down!), preceded by crap like https://archive.is/7JeSe. On Google it's the 2nd hit, also preceded by what seems like SEO spam.

[1] https://github.com/wildskyf/personal-blocklist

I sometimes find myself going to Google for some complex queries or obscure error messages as well, but I'll usually try an alternative query first.

In this case, DDG happens to have a bang shortcut for postgres which takes you directly to the search results on the PostgreSQL site if you query !postgres array_agg.

There's a surprisingly large number of these which end up making it more useful than the generic web search results page overall.

> we have that if Google where to say employ people to look at say the top million searches and heavily penalize junk

I doubt a million is going to make a dent in it. Content marketers are automatically generating this stuff, and Google has billions of users, many of which will occasionally invent a novel query.

If they curated like that, esp with employees, they'd open themselves to an infinite number of lawsuits.