I've had a serious go at DDG 3 times now - last month I tried it but I ended up just using !g for every search and so went back to Google. The thing I use most often, and major frustration with Google, is limiting the search by time period : I wish the additional tools would be sticky.

I did blind search engine testing and Google came out on top.

That said Google is frustrating me more and more, especially now you need to "put it in quotes" if you don't want them to just show you things they think might be tangentially related in some way to your search and, you know, show you results with the actual terms in.

It's quite interesting to me that Google's main advantage when I first used it was I didn't need to AND all my terms together, it was the differentiating feature that won me over (I can't recall who from, it was around the time of Teoma and AllTheWeb IIRC). Now even when you use the cumbersome notation to say a term is required it still shows you pages without the term on ... but it nonetheless is the best offering I can find (for me). Argh!

The lack of a time-bounded search is one of the few things I'll return to Google for.

Also: news, and book or Google Scholar.

I'm willing to accept the lack of these most of the time. Yes, privacy matters to me.

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/1734130?hl=en might be useful for you.

Link is to "verbatim mode" which is basically "Google classic" where all the words entered are required to be on the page in the order entered - kinda like a single set of quotes around the full query.

Not exactly what I'm after but might be useful, thanks.

Good question. Google is better at guessing your focus. I'm not sure how they do it. Sometimes duckduck is pretty lost and scattershot. I have the opportunity of rephrasing the query or just hitting !g . If I don't mind google tracking the query, then I'll do a !g and often what I want is in the top 3. Sometimes, I don't want google tracking me (e.g. to check out a health issue) , then I'll work out a better query on duck duck.

Perhaps Google is better at guessing your focus precisely because they are tracking you?

The queries I find myself switching to Google for are:

* When I want a local result (i.e. I'm googling for business cards, and I want a UK based company that will sell them to me). This is because DuckDuckGo doesn't use your location (by default).

* When I am searching for a word that means something different to me than for the general population. For instance when I search for Python I don't want to see snakes. Google does this by tracking the results you click and forming a profile of you.

I guess the DuckDuckGo way is to search these by !uk and !programming, but that is a whole extra word to type. It would be nice if it let you list your interests in its settings page, creating your own filter bubble.

I wonder if this could be solved by creating fake personas, like "computer geek", or "professional programmer".

You opt into one or few of this personae and each query sent to a search engine would track this persona.

The key is that these categories should be few and predefined (i.e. offered by the search engine) so that they cannot be used to track individual users.

I'm a new Duck Duck Go user, and I have noticed the same as user tosseraccount: that I've trained my google returns to meet my needs much better.

I've noticed trying to find news stories that are not in wide circulation (small events in foreign countries or not-so-wide-spread announcements) are much harder to find on DDG.

Having said that, I try to use DDG FIRST, then move on to other engines if it will not provide. It does feel like a sacrifice from Google; I guess they know me real real well.