Well, they are working on the front end of the problem.

DDG's real issue is that they don't use their own indices. As far as I know, they are still dependent upon the Bing APIs in order to actually perform the search. So, while they have shown that there is a lot you can do (wikipedia integration, for example), there is a lot missing on the backend.

IIRC, dukgo does do some of their own indexing, and their goal is to move onto their own indexes eventually. Indexing the whole Internet might have been a reasonable plan when google was a startup, that is a much larger challenge for a small company now than it was 15 years ago.

For what it's worth, you weren't the only one with that initial reaction.

I remained woefully ignorant of DDG until Spring of this year (no clue how, I just missed it), but once discovering it, my definition of a good search tool has been forever changed by a single character.

The ! (bang).

!walmart, !netflix, !.net, !clojure, !java, ...

!weatherspark (huh, it's not there, I'll submit that, now anyone can !weatherspark)

The ! means DDG is my single-point search engine for almost any site imaginable. And it uses that site's search feature instead of a naive textual scrape (a la Google).

The Chrome Omnibox tends to fill that role for me. If I type "cloj" and hit the down arrow twice in Chrome, it takes me straight to clojure.org. And it's integrated with my history - once I've done it, if I type "cl" and hit return, I go straight back.

Amazingly this feature is still in yahoo search in the form of search shortcuts.

http://search.yahoo.com/osc/help#readyshortcuts

You forgot !g (google search). That is at least the shortcut I think is most important. With it, DDG is always at least as good as google, while it provides a better interface.

I didn't even know that one; thank you!

As much as I hate to say this, DDG is a search engine from the past. It is Google without the intelligence and machine learning on top of it. This is working fine for now, until Google succeeds in crafting the nextgen engine.

duckduckgo is a meta search engine, they are using results from Bing so it's as good as bing is.

Note: I love ddg.