> And yet, none of the contenders for the throne can deliver the same level of search quality.
YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.
I so wish DuckDuckGo were a viable replacement for Google's search results because I love the concept, and you're right that it is for simple queries, but my main use case for google these days is naively pasting long error message sequences from compilations gone bad and reading the relevant stackoverflow questions that lead to the fix. DuckDuckGo chokes on this stuff.
Well, you don't need Duckduckgo for that. You can set your browser to search SO directly if you type "!so <query>". The point of an internet search engine is to search the entire internet and give you the best results.
1) The results I get in DDG are the same results I get in Bing - which means that DDG is for me just a shell around Bing. And even though DDG is not sending to Bing any cookies with my ID, well, being a power user I can and do use the Incognito/Private mode of my browser. Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.
And the bang shortcuts of DDG are also provided by my browser. I mean, if I'm concerned with privacy, why in the world would I want to send my Google searches to DDG's servers?
2) People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US. Outside of the US, like in Europe, non-Google search results get to be like really, really bad ;-)
I can't comment on that because I don't use Bing. Perhaps Bing would suffice as a Google replacement then? The "instant answer" type results from DDG probably do not work with Bing.
> Furthermore, your interests can function like a digital fingerprint, so if Google or Microsoft want to identify you without any cookie whatsoever, they can and DDG does not help.
How would that work if GA is blocked and "!g" is used only rarely? Also, I use Tor and DDG is the only search engine that doesn't annoy me with captchas (Google's seem totally broken, often I need to solve multiple captchas for a single query - I wish people would stop linking to Google searches...).
> People saying that DDG's search results are just as good are probably living in the US.
No, I live in Austria. I recall complaining about search results about the time the "filter bubble" experiment by DDG ran, but the situation has greatly improved since then.
I have been using DuckDuckGo for more than 4 years now. I would use google only if DDG does not provide a good result. In the last one year, queries that went unanswered on DDG did not turn up a good result on google either. So for me, DDG has not completely replaced google.
Interesting. I have it setup on one of my machines as the default and catch myself typing "!g query" by instinct because that's what I need to type most of the time.
Maybe Google has adapted to what I look at, but to me it seems Google is way better as soon as a term has multiple uses (like something is a. a normal household word and b. a library/programming language/...), presenting answers for both, vs. DDG which seems to latch only on the most common meaning.
it's not that ddg can't index the pages you're looking for or connect your query with those pages. it's that google knows so much about you they skew the results heavily.
YMMV, but I have been using Duckduckgo exclusively on my desktop and smartphone for half a year or so and the rare times I used Google (with "!g" prefix) during that time, I could not find better search results there either. So for all common purposes, DDG fully replaces Google for me (and I'm not a novice user who cannot tell, I've been using the web obsessively for ~20 years [and yes, AltaVista before Google]). Perhaps you should dare switch to DDG for a while and see if the illusion, that Google works better in some unspecified way, disappears.