[rochellle]

DuckDuckGo isn't that great, but the !bang options make it easy to diversify, and branch searches to multiple targets, to compare outcomes.

Two things become obvious at that point, and the main one is that other search engines don't just customize search results to individuals, they actually spend costly human resources currating and QA'ing results. DuckDuckGo's search results kind of suck, and the reason they're not as good is because the results are not groomed to the same degree, by as many eyes, nor to the same level of quality.

The other obvious thing quickly noticed is that DuckDuckGo's !bang operators are so, so, so much more handy than some of the other horrendously mangled, inscrutable query strings you wind up landing on, that would require 5 or 10 clicks, navigating the intended user interfaces of the parent sites that actually host the results.

Compare using !googleimages on DuckDuckGo, to what actually happens when you click and type for results at https://images.google.com?

It's kind of silly that you can't just pass a query string to Google, and that DuckDuckGo does their query strings better than Google does for it's own product.

[oAlbe]

> DuckDuckGo isn't that great

Do you mind elaborating on this a bit? I've been using DDG for a couple of years now and, although at the beginning I would fallback to Google very often, now that changed. I still fallback to Google from time to time, but it's more to have a confirmation that, as parent says, the results are disappointing than anything else. Now I probably use Google after trying g DDG once in every 10/15 queries. It used to be one in three when I switched.

To be honest, I even find DDG to be way way better than Google in certain results. Programming related queries that would produce StackOverflow results are one example. And I'm not even considering the preview feature that DDG has that shows you the accepted answer to the SO question right in the search page.

One thing I don't like though, is the way the images and videos preview works (not in the image tab, in the search tab) on DDG. I find that row of videos/images to just be annoying since I would explicitly make an image search if that's what I needed.

That said, my experience now is that if DDG results are disappointing, there's a very very high chance that Google results will be disappointing too.

[petra]

Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ?

Also, it's a bad design decision to make bangs belong to search engines. In the past the firefox extension lookpick[1] solved that problem very well: They crowdsourced search engnines, had their own search box in the right corner of the screen, and to make it easy to pick the right search engines, search engines used searchable tags.

On top of that, if you add easy help for search operators for each site(also crowd sourced), would be really useful.

I wish there was something like that for chrome.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lookpick-sear...

[jplatte]

> Is the !g bang gives you personalized results as good as google results ?

Including !g in your search query simply redirects you to a google search with the same query (minus the !g). So you can set your search engine to ddg, then select the actual search engine by starting with a bang and whatever search you want. Some examples:

!gi - Google images

!gh - GitHub search

!w - Wikipedia

Starting a query with ! on https://duckduckgo.com/ also gives you autocompletion, so you can quickly discover what redirects are available.

[thinkmassive]

Chrome has built-in support for multiple search engines (many sites take the liberty of doing this automatically). You can customize the keyword that triggers each one.

For example, if you want to search HN you could add:

URL: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%s Keyword: hn

Then you simply type "hn" in the omnibox, hit space, and enter your search term.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95426

[petra]

Sure adding your own is possible, or using some chrome extension like SearchBar, but having everything available, crowdsourced, and tagged, is totally different experience.

[robin_reala]

(!i takes you straight to Google Images)