>typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).

Part of the issue is you search differently with Google. Most users treat their keywords as circles in a venn diagram - the top result being the center.

Try being a little more explicit with DDG. Add the year a movie came out, the first and last name of a person + their title if it's a common name, things like that.

Also an aside, "!s" routes through startpage, which proxies a google search for you - much more private but still leveraging the Pagerank algorithm.

What you describe is a clear regression to pre-Google days where searching was kind of dark art. DDG really needs to improve its usability and try prioritize the most relevant results without specifying extra keywords. Yes, it is impossible to be level with Google in this game. But DDG can surely do much better than now, without any intrusive tracking. E.g. when I search a restaurant by its name from an IP address in Europe, why do I get results with restaurants in the USA? Or when I search for a name from a university IP address, why instead of the researcher with that name I get the name of a second rate sportsman?

Searching Google is the real dark art these days, especially if you don't use personalized results. I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.

At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.

What annoys me with DDG is that it treats a list of words as logical OR; the help page states that

Dog Cat

Will return results for Dog OR Cat

To force to AND one has to quote every word, thus:

"Dog" "Cat"

Which is tedious especially on mobile.

I don't know why they think people would want to default to OR.

> I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.

However, on Google you do get an identifier next to the result that shows whether your term is missing from the page or not which allows for weeding out "unrelated" results relatively quickly. It also has the "must include" link so that you can narrow your searches without having to retype the query.

Doing the same search on DDG just shows some results but it's not clear whether my specific terms are on the page or not.

Same here. I often have to switch to "verbatim" results. I hate their too clever "we guessed what you're really searching for! here you go!" results...

Not analyzing IP addresses to deliver more relevant results seems pretty aligned with that whole "respecting your privacy is our main selling point". I gladly add another word to my queries if that keeps DDG from taking a step towards where google is today.

A couple of months back, everybody went ballistic when the EU GDPR declared IP addresses as "personal data". Can't recall any posts/articles that were actually defending this GDPR provision—if you can point us to one, I'd love to read the counter-arguments.

So I believe that there is a consensus that using IP addresses to improve search results would be fair game for DDG. It's also consistent with the DDG promise: "we don't track you".

OTOH, not using them has only marginal effect on user's privacy: (a) DDG doesn't serve ads anyway, and (b) the metadata of user's online activity are still available to three-letter agencies to analyze.

as long as they aren't being stored, it shouldn't matter. You could just read user's IP, use that to filter results, then throw it away

Also IP by itself isn't really that much of a privacy problem. It only becomes a problem when it's used in the process of delinkage of more sensitive information

It's better if the engine does analyze IP to bring relevant information but not keep it related to search history for later analysis.

Bringing all the result pretending everyone lives in US sounds like a crappy strategy.

Also consistency is to be valued. Example: if I say to someone else over the phone to search for "X", then I usually want them to see the exact same search results as I do.

True. As other users noted, when using DDG you have to be more specific simply because DDG doesn't have as much information about you as Google has.

But ... this also means that a DDG search would work well on Google. So a revert-to-Google button could help people make the transition. I suppose that people will become more and more specific in their queries until at some point they never need to hit that "!g" button anymore.

I find that DDG has as good as Google results, but it "speaks" differently. I was with you, but the more I use DDG the more I find my queries adapting to DDGs style. Now when I end up using Google, by accident on other people's devices, I get bad results because now I am used to searching in a DDG way and not a Google way.

This is interesting, can you expand at all? I have a similar sense, but can't really articulate the difference.

Not the person you replied to, but: Google invests tremendous wealth into guessing what you mean based on what it knows about you and what it knows in general. That's how you can type in a generic word that's also the title of 300 different movies, books, and TV shows, and still get exactly what you expected (usually).

DuckDuckGo is Google before it started down this path. You have to be specific. The more words you provide, the smaller the set of possible answers, and the more likely your answer is at the top.

Google, these days, tends to report the same number of results no matter how specific you get. It used to get smaller the more words you put in. It's a philosophical difference. Google assumes you only have a vague idea of what you're looking for and is increasingly confident it knows best.

DuckDuckGo starts with the same assumption, but trusts you to refine your own query without the help of a global network of patterns acting on data. That doesn't work too well on Google now. You're just as likely to trigger an anti-bot check refining queries as you are to find what you're looking for.

It's for this very reason that I find google annoying when searching for programming solutions - if I'm switching between languages often, it "learns" that I'm focusing on C# problems and always bubbles those to the top, even though I may have been looking for a Typescript solution.

DDG is far from perfect in this case, but at least you can refine the search per website without having to add a keyword to the search. By the way try doing some search for programming languages that choose a poor name for a bit of a laugh (I am looking at you Rust and Go).

I am developing https://jivesearch.com/, which is basically an open source version of DDG. We've got that right underneath the search results. Defaults to !g, !b, !a, and !yt but you can change it to whatever !bangs you want by passing in the b url parameter (eg "https://jivesearch.com/?q=bob+marley&b=w"). Would love your feedback!

Looks nice! But ... the "!ddg" button is missing ;)

Fair point. I just added it. I noticed they don't have a Jive Search !bang ;).

Why make it Google-specific? What if DDG could suggest from a range of other search engines that might give you better results based on the nature of your query?

Having buttons for "try this search on [Google] [Yandex]" could be useful data to collect for improving the search results.

Yes, however Google's results would be different for everyone, based on what Google knows about you.

Because you want to make the transition easy.

Some sort of a setting for displaying 3-5 frequently used bangs below the search bar would be nice.

Not to try and derail the conversation, but "!sp" uses startpage, a proxy that searches google on your behalf so google doesn't get to track you.

I think there should a be a set of customer configurable (!!! Please no automatic assignment based on ML) buttons that add desired bangs to a search.