Quick question: what types of searches are better done through DDG than Google? I've tried a few searches, but haven't found DDG better than Google...is DDG superior only for certain types of searches?
Of course it is subjective, but it really should be better across a wide swatch of searches. I think it is most clear though on what is X searches. The information view (from the home page) goes even further on these type of searches and grabs topic summaries in real time.
Other areas where I think we do noticeably better on average are with names and long un-quoted searches (5+ words). Of course you can find counter-examples everywhere...
What I always suggest to people is to give it a week as your primary search engine. If you (or anyone) do/does, I'd really appreciate you getting back to me with your feedback.
* Is disambiguation redundant? Can't you just infer from history and location? Or is this against your privacy policy?
The single most frustrating thing I find about search engines is iterating a non-trivial search. It doesn't seem like DDG has an edge against Google here. I long to see a search engine that makes it easy to send a question off to Quora, Vark etc.
(I like the bang feature: many of my searches are of the form "wiki william henry harrison". By the way, I think the search results for http://duckduckgo.com/?q=william+henry+harrison are out of order)
My ideal search-engine would be a cross between a traditional search-engine (machine) and a Q&A site (humans). If you were taking a lot of iterations to find your answer, you could simply expand the text-area to allow you to write out a human question.
So, short of DDG becoming also a Q&A site....yeah, dunno :P.
DDG seems to be less 'shopping biased' than google, and seems to do a better job of categorizing stuff.
I wished some search engine would implement a 'context' search though, that would really make my day.
Trying to find something like 'go' by keyword search alone is really a problem, you always have to add a bunch of other keywords in the hope that that will narrow it down enough, if you could just filter out those contexts that you're not interested in after the first search is over that would be really neat.
