Sometimes I get really frustrated with Google when doing programming-related searches. After spending a minute trying to coerce Google into recognizing an API call exactly and having to exclude popular typos and alternate spellings of what Google thinks is the root word, I end up switching to DDG and getting the answer I was looking for. Google is awesome for general queries, but lately I'm finding more and more that it tries to be too helpful and the search results for my precise, specifically crafted query end up being so broad that it's useless.
That is the coercion I mentioned. I wish I could provide an example, but there have been times where I have to both "quote" the terms I really want and -"quote" the terms it corrected things to. It usually only happens for longer queries when I'm trying to drill into a specific issue.
Come to think of it, perhaps this is their feature which uses previous searches and treats your current search as a continuation of the last one; though I've altered my query the search terms I abandoned get resurrected.
[Edit: confirmed!] I just tried this in relation to another comment I posted. I typed peer to peer lending into Chrome's bar to search for this. A bunch of finance related results came up. I was looking for movie lending, so I altered my search to peer to peer lending movies and looked at the results. Still unsatisfied, I thought that maybe the term borrowing was better than lending. So I changed my search to peer to peer borrowing movies. Lo and behold, the search results show a page full of results with the word lending bolded and no results that show borrowing at all: http://imgur.com/lPPQmxY
If I absolutely didn't want the word lending in the results, I would need to alter the search to peer to peer borrowing -lending movies to avoid this. For development searches where I'm sometimes trying to find a needle in a haystack, I don't want to have to keep excluding numerous terms I have already decided are undesirable. As I never sign in when searching and I can't be bothered to find and change whatever Google setting causes this every time I fire up my browser, I find DDG to work the way I expect and often with better results too.
The major for me is being able to do meta-queries that will be sent to the relevant website, e.g. "!maps 401 broadway to Canal St Station" or "!wa how many stars are in the galaxy"
You get better (short, sane and email-friendly) URLs if you access google searches via DDG bang. !gm = google maps, !g = google search, !gi = google images, etc.
I do the same sort of queries but just use the search keywords feature of Firefox - so that's surely even faster as DDG isn't acting as intermediary to interpret the search request and redirect.
That said I think the competition DDG has provided the other search providers has been a benefit to me.
I think people choose DDG for its emotional appeal (they like that it's a small company, privacy benefits, all kind of reasons besides search quality). Later they rationalize about it being better.
Frankly, I think this is morally wrong. When they use an inferior search engine, or inferior maps app for that matter, people are dumber than they might otherwise be. They miss a boost of intelligence, perhaps not IQ, but they are less effective operating in the real world. The world as a whole is worse because of it.
I disagree about the ordering (i.e. for me, for certain queries, it was objectively better first, before the other criteria played a part).
However, you're saying that the only thing (or the best thing) that will make the world better is better quality results. This is wrong. Playing the long game by supporting such search engines means that quality can improve and you end up with both better quality search engines AND morally improved companies. The whole world will be better because of it. You're thinking too short term.
The thing I like a lot with DDG is that you can easily configure the region and language explicitly. Google keeps redirecting me depending on geolocation (that isn't always correct). When searching for shopping, I want things to be local. When programming, I much prefer stuff in English to German or Italian.
Most of the time what I want is in "the little box" right at the top of the list (aka the "Instant Answer"), so I don't have to click and scroll... Google had "I'm feeling lucky," but just putting the summary of the primary result at the top is better/faster/visually cleaner.
Google have some instant answer style results now (eg search "barack obama"). I'm not sure if they're a result of DDG's work on "instant answer" but it looked that way from where I'm sitting. Just general industry development though I'd guess.
The same search on DDG gives a less "newsy" and more useful and explorable result, like a software encyclopedia. It looks like a Facebook profile (because it's taken from the Wikipedia page, which reads that way). I think that's the right approach.
Now, if Google can pull off something similar with heuristics alone they may have an advantage, because those little boxes are run by code covering a whole bunch of special cases, and that could be a bottleneck.
But I love the exploration options of the instant answers.. What Google is doing is definitely more time-sensitive (they're justifiably tooting their own horn a bit with it), but it doesn't feel as useful in the typical case (does anyone really use Google like a newspaper?). If you search something like "barak obama news" on DDG, you get basically the same result as the Google headline summary, and it didn't get in the way of the list on the "barak obama" results page. It feels more natural, to me at least.
"I came for the privacy, but I stayed for the features..."
