[neltnerb]

By a huge margin the most frequent time I drop back to Google is because they have unit conversions built in. So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

It's basically replaced my TI-89 for years, I hate doing calculations with units by hand and it's super error prone to not include them in the calculations.

For everything else, duckduckgo has consistently provided a suitable result to answer my question for 90%+ of stuff, no worse than Google. It's super rare for me to check if Google has better results for normal things. I see them as a different ordering rather than superior ordering, so I think of Google more as an alternative than a fallback. They clearly both interpret whether a site is a good match using different algorithms but I don't know I'd say one is strictly superior.

[divbzero]

DuckDuckGo does do unit conversions “100 JPY in EUR” [1] and unit-less calculations “2^32 - 1” [2].

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=100+JPY+in+EUR

[2]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2%5E32-1

But like you I drop back for unit-aware calculations. For those an alternative to Google is Wolfram Alpha “!wa speed of light / 400nm in terahertz” [3] which also allows for symbolic computation “!wa integral of 2x” [4].

[3]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+speed+of+light+%2F+400nm+in+te...

[4]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=!wa+integral+of+2x

[dontbenebby]

When DDG fails for a conversion I usually append !wa and Wolfram Alpha parses it easily

[majewsky]

> So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

You can use the command-line program units(1) to do this, available on all Unices. (The preinstalled version on macOS is horribly outdated though, so you might have to look for a newer version in Homebrew.)

  $ units --verbose
  Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-02-20 
  3070 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units

  You have: c / 400 nm
  You want: terahertz
        c / 400 nm = 749.4811449999999695137376 terahertz
        c / 400 nm = (1 / 0.001334256380792608193130988) terahertz

The only drawback is that getting up-to-date currency exchange rates requires running an extra program, units_cur.

[juusto]

>So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.

sheesh...

Made me feel super dumb for googling "10kg in pounds"