That's a really good point. Every few months I try to adapt to using DDG as my primary search, but I always find myself throwing a !g into my searches, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm curious, for what kind of searches do you find DDG's own search results to be good enough (or better) than Google's? What kind of searches make you bang to Google?
I generally use !g if I want local results (say, looking for a restaurant) or I use !m if I want a map (which is really the same thing as local for me). I also use Google if I know my particular search is going to be obscure and/or noisy. For instance, weird error messages get a !g. The other major exception is that Google Scholar is incomparable for finding academic papers on a particular topic. However, for everything else (general knowledge, non-weird errors, most programming-related topics) I find the DDG results entirely sufficient. In fact, I intentionally use DDG by itself if I expect to end up at Wikipedia since DDG adds possible Wikipedia matches at the top of the search results.
That being said, I end up using the DDG results for >50% of my searches. If you do more local searches, or if the things you search for tend to be noisy or obscure then, of course, YMMV.
About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are
!yt (youtube)
!gmail
!news
!gg (google groups)
!hn
!boingboing
!torrent
!itunes
!rubydoc
!rubygems
!codex
!so (stack)
!am (amazon)
!jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar)
!flickr
and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google
Comments
That's a really good point. Every few months I try to adapt to using DDG as my primary search, but I always find myself throwing a !g into my searches, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'm curious, for what kind of searches do you find DDG's own search results to be good enough (or better) than Google's? What kind of searches make you bang to Google?
I generally use !g if I want local results (say, looking for a restaurant) or I use !m if I want a map (which is really the same thing as local for me). I also use Google if I know my particular search is going to be obscure and/or noisy. For instance, weird error messages get a !g. The other major exception is that Google Scholar is incomparable for finding academic papers on a particular topic. However, for everything else (general knowledge, non-weird errors, most programming-related topics) I find the DDG results entirely sufficient. In fact, I intentionally use DDG by itself if I expect to end up at Wikipedia since DDG adds possible Wikipedia matches at the top of the search results.
That being said, I end up using the DDG results for >50% of my searches. If you do more local searches, or if the things you search for tend to be noisy or obscure then, of course, YMMV.
About the same as me! I generally do DDG first unless I know I want a map, or I'm searching for error messages. Other commands I use fairly frequently are
!yt (youtube) !gmail !news !gg (google groups) !hn !boingboing !torrent !itunes !rubydoc !rubygems !codex !so (stack) !am (amazon) !jstor (and a few other specific academic journal searches, but you can also use !googlescholar) !flickr
and probably a few others! I encourage everyone to check out the list and get it into their workflow. With Alfred + DDG I can get to most things much quicker than I could through google
https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html