I have used DDG and found it to be amazing for some searches early on. I felt the same about Wolfram Alpha. Both still seem awesome in their own way, but I haven't been frustrated enough to switch from Google as my default search.
I will say that as I've done more development, I've added more of my own direct site searches to Firefox as keywords for sites like StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Youtube and the Rails API. Searching said sites becomes "ctrl-L, so/wp/yt/railsapi <search term>". If I ever see myself having to dev on separate machines, I'd learn the DDG keywords for API searches.
You used to be able to group search terms using () on Google. It appears that you can't do that any longer.
Google will sometimes substitute words for you, and say "did you mean X?". That's gently frustrating; I'm sure it's great for most people but not for me.
Worse, sometimes google will sub words and say "Search for X instead of Y".
Sometimes, and this is what really bugs me, is you'll include three or four words in the search term, and Google will silently drop one. I only find out when I open the URL, and having wasted a few minutes noodling around the document, I try to find my word using a ctrl F and I discover it's not there.
Here's an example (that appears to work now): (I'm fully aware that maybe I'm doing it wrong, and I welcome advice about best current practice for Google searching. (For example, did Google ever group words in brackets? When did they stop doing that?))
+("os x" OR "osx") +temperature +(console OR "command line")
I expected this to return URLs that:
1) MUST CONTAIN either "os x" or "osx" and
2) MUST CONTAIN either "console" or "command line" and
3) MUST CONTAIN the word "temperature".
When I was trying it the first page of results did not contain the word temperature - obviously very annoying.
I know what you mean about dropping words. If Google did group by brackets, it was a feature I never learned (though I haven't browsed the guide too often). That search style reminds me of Craigslist.
What's interesting is that I pasted in your query and the first page had all but 2 results with temperature in it. Strange.
Comments
Out of curiosity, what are your frustrations?
I have used DDG and found it to be amazing for some searches early on. I felt the same about Wolfram Alpha. Both still seem awesome in their own way, but I haven't been frustrated enough to switch from Google as my default search.
I will say that as I've done more development, I've added more of my own direct site searches to Firefox as keywords for sites like StackOverflow, Wikipedia, Youtube and the Rails API. Searching said sites becomes "ctrl-L, so/wp/yt/railsapi <search term>". If I ever see myself having to dev on separate machines, I'd learn the DDG keywords for API searches.
You used to be able to group search terms using () on Google. It appears that you can't do that any longer.
Google will sometimes substitute words for you, and say "did you mean X?". That's gently frustrating; I'm sure it's great for most people but not for me.
Worse, sometimes google will sub words and say "Search for X instead of Y".
Sometimes, and this is what really bugs me, is you'll include three or four words in the search term, and Google will silently drop one. I only find out when I open the URL, and having wasted a few minutes noodling around the document, I try to find my word using a ctrl F and I discover it's not there.
Here's an example (that appears to work now): (I'm fully aware that maybe I'm doing it wrong, and I welcome advice about best current practice for Google searching. (For example, did Google ever group words in brackets? When did they stop doing that?))
I expected this to return URLs that: 1) MUST CONTAIN either "os x" or "osx" and 2) MUST CONTAIN either "console" or "command line" and 3) MUST CONTAIN the word "temperature".When I was trying it the first page of results did not contain the word temperature - obviously very annoying.
I know what you mean about dropping words. If Google did group by brackets, it was a feature I never learned (though I haven't browsed the guide too often). That search style reminds me of Craigslist.
What's interesting is that I pasted in your query and the first page had all but 2 results with temperature in it. Strange.