[TheBurningOr]

I tried Blekko for a bit this past fall and was not terribly impressed. I, frankly, don't understand what the /slash notation is doing. is it a filter? Is it a specific type of search?

However, I have been using DuckDuckGo almost exclusively for the past 2 months and I'm not sure that I'll be going back anytime soon. DDG is touted as being for the privacy conscious, but I can't say that was my primary motivation in switching. I have been increasingly unhappy with Google's 'bubbling' and my searches there increasingly felt like I was running in circles through crappy mailing list archives and spam sites and all their new 'features.'

DDG brought back memories of what drew me to Google in the first place, over a decade ago. It is clean, straightforward, and relevant. Yeah, I know it's running on Yahoo Search APIs which are running on Bing, but it's still a drastically different search experience.

Finally, doing a bit of research into DDGs extras and the !bang notation pages kind of sealed the deal for me. Want to know your IP address? just search "ip" Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that. Want to search the python documentation? Just use !python. Want to re-run your last search in Google? Just add !g Those features alone are enough to make it a true power user's search engine.

[dmoy]

Just to be devil's advocate here, everything you list seems to be easy to do using any web browser (since we're talking about power users here):

>Want to know your IP address? just search "ip"

https://www.google.com/search?q=ip

--> Your public IP address is 123.456.789.>256? - Learn more

>Want lorem ipsum text, just search for that

Ok that's pretty cool.

>Want to search the python documentation

For me this is a language other than python, but I have queries in chrome/opera that search by keyword. C++ is c<space>stuff, java is j<space> stuff. As an added benefit, for any internal documentation I can have keywords going directly to internal stuff.

>Want to re-run your last search in Google

Ditto with bing b<space>, amazon a<space>, etc.

As a 'power user' my needs go way beyond what any search engine does. Web browser, scripts, etc pick up the slack.

Also, am I missing something here? Everyone keeps mentioning that DDG runs off of Bing. Do they do anything in the interim to your queries, or do you get the same results by going to bing.com? And if so, is everyone just arguing that bing's results are better than Google's now? (Could be, I dunno).

It is kinda cool that you get wolfram results, etc (wherever they pulled lorem ipsum from for example) all compiled for you instead of having to keyword everything I guess.

And that's enough rambling, sleep.

[lusr]

Hmmm I wasn't too impressed with DDG results in the past. I just tried it again with "efficient self organising maps implementation". The DDG results are completely useless nevermind almost totally irrelevant to my query. Then I remembered American English spelling and tried again with "organizing". DDG results improved, but the fact I have to remember such details is annoying (I don't with Google, Yahoo or Bing).

Having run the query on the other engines, Google & Bing are on par (I use Google exclusively but should probably check Bing from time to time), Yahoo 2nd most useful (somewhat generic results, though), DDG 3rd (student projects in the search results vs. published papers in the other engine results, results that are overly broad) and Blekko the worst (it seems to just pump out results with one or two of the words I queried, no concept of relevance).

[msbarnett]

Slashtags are a way to build specific search domains. The easiest way to understand one is to build one for yourself.

Example: I built myself a /objc slashtag that includes Apple's docs, Stackoverflow, Cocoadev.com, Mike Ash's blog, and a few other sources.

Now, when I go to blekko and search, say, "calendars /objc", I get only info about calendars in objective-c from those sources, and no noise.

Edit: I find this rather more useful than DDGs ! Syntax in that it's user-extensible, and lets me aggregate many site searches into one slashtag, rather than just punting me to a specific site's engine.

[greglindahl]

Some slashtags are filters. Other ones are a specific type of search. DDG uses ! in a somewhat similar fashion to /; for example, on blekko, adding /google does your search on google. Adding /python does your search on a list of 136 important Python websites. And you can volunteer to help edit the /python slashtag.