[newscracker]

I have degoogled myself heavily and don’t use anything other than Maps once in a while, but DDG is not the best answer as a replacement for people who just want to get things done. Instead of telling people to use DDG alone, it’s better to tell people to use DDG, Searx, and others so that there’s choice and freedom.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but the quality of search results and the rate of improvement leave much to be desired. So I tend to go to !s (search in startpage) or !g (search on Google). DDG would have to improve by leaps and bounds if it has to be the only search engine that I have to use (or rather, the only search engine who’s direct results I have to use).

Apart from poorer search results, instant answers aren’t great either. DDG has currency conversions as well as stock quotes as instant answers. But both these are so highly hit or miss that I end up going to some other site anyway. For currency conversion, depending on where you put the currency symbol or code (as a prefix or suffix) or if you don’t leave a space between the currency and the numerical value, you may or may not get instant answers. For stock quotes, there are many symbols where, if you just type the symbol, you wouldn’t get instant answers. You’d have to type “<stock symbol> stock”. For some stocks just typing the stock symbol is enough.