[pseudoramble]

In my experience, I've been using it for a few years now and I've maybe used !g 4 or 5 times total in the past couple of years. I find the performance of image searches just fine myself. So it's always fascinating to see that people report such different experiences with DDG.

It's hard to know for sure what's happening though. Maybe my searches are just very simple and don't need anything complex? Maybe I'm luckier and always have fast internet connections? Maybe it's some other factor I'm not thinking of? Who knows without trying to come up with a more systematic way to compare things.

[ravenstine]

I alsmost never need !s or !g, and I tend to find what I'm looking for. Most of my searches tend to be related to coding, so it just could be that DDG is particularly good at those queries, but I still wonder what exactly it is that people are finding on Google that isn't on DDG. And I used to be one of those people who thought DDG was lousy.

[takeda]

Same, I think it might be something psychological like being used to the Google page.

[cvnyw]

It's pretty easy to replicate my problems with image search and I suspect what the problem might be.

They have a proxy (just like google) so they don't directly load the images you search for, they make their servers load the images and then send you a proxified version. If you search for obscure terms, they won't have a cached version available so they will have to request it from the actual server, and that makes all images take a while to load. On the other hand Google always keeps the images cached so they can serve them instantly.