When DDG fails, use !g followed by your query. It takes you straight to the Google results. Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).
> Decent compromise while you wait for DDG to improve in certain areas (and it is improving).
Since it mostly uses Y!S's results, which tend to suck compared to google's (for my searches anyway), I'm not sure it can improve much in that area, which is by far the one that pains me the most.
And if I'm going to use google 9 times out of 10, I can just remove the indirection.
I wouldn't say it's as bad as 9/10. They don't mostly use Y! results from what I've heard from Gabriel. They do their own crawling and ranking too, so I do expect results to improve. They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.
0-click info and search ideas are really nice features. Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.
> They can afford to be more liberal about banning spammy sites, which helps a lot.
It's cool, but I've not seen it helping much so far, since the base results suck ridding them of some of the crap don't improve them noticeably.
> 0-click info and search ideas are really nice features.
They're nice features when they display information I want. They generally don't.
> Another useful hashbang I use a lot is !a which searches amazon directly.
No. Just no. Firefox has been able to do that since 0.9 if not earlier, I'm sure other web browsers can handle that as well. I have no need whatsoever for the indirection through DDG. Here's how I search amazon: focus address bar, type "a somethingsomething", return.
