I applaud what DDG is doing. I've been using it as my default search engine for roughly 2 years. Yes, there are some areas for improvement, especially when it comes to complex technical queries. But for the majority of everyday things, DDG is excellent, and returns less advertisement bloat within its results than Google/Bing.
Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!
I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.
One example I can remember:
I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:
It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.
In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.
Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.
That would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.
OP's motivations might be different, but a non native english speaker might find that this kind of short, unoffensive and straight to the point corrections could be very useful indeed.
This was my experience with DDG as well. For everyday searches, it does a fine search. But it fails pretty miserably with complex technical queries which is probably 95% of what I use web search for. For that reason, after trying DDG for about a year (for the second time) I switched to startpage.com.
Thx for the info on startpage.com. Never heard of it till this thread on HN. Just made it my homepage and added it to my tool bar.
I switched to DDG a couple years ago after becoming concerned about privacy. Unfortunately, DDG has never quite cut it for me in terms of search results. I do a TON of technology related searches, particularly wrt very obscure programming related technologies, especially related to embedded target dev. DDG always comes up short, and I typically end up doing "!g" searches. So startpage.com appears to the best blend of privacy + good search results. For me anyway...
Plus ducks are my favorite animal, so launching DDG as I begin the work day is a joy!