But chrome and firefox provide it for years, without giving up your queries to a...

rys · on May 6, 2012

In this context, all search engines are "3rd party".

tonfa · on May 6, 2012

If you want to search amazon, or the python website, why give your query to ddg? Especially if you don't have to when you use browser keywords.

perigrin · on May 7, 2012

In a word: curation.

Amazon is probably always going to be the most relevant search engine for their site, but the current choice for python searches may not be.

An example similar to python but that I have first hand experience with is Perl's CPAN searches. There are two search engines for CPAN, http://search.cpan.org and http://metacpan.org. DDG's !cpan originally defaulted to the first one, but at the time it's results were not as accurate or informative as the second one. Upon appeal the DDG people switched the default to http://metacpan.org providing everyone who used the !cpan results with what they felt was a better result.