[simias]

I try to switch to ddg roughly every 6 months. I usually switch back within the hour.

One example I can remember:

I was working on some linux V4L2 code and wanted to get more informations on the "buf_queue". By mistake I searched for "vbuf_queue". Google's results:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=vbuf_queue

It only shows 3 results where I am (and 0 a few months ago when the problem occured) which makes it pretty obvious I'm not searching for the right thing.

As for DDG:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vbuf_queue

It displays a pageful of garbage that I will parse for a while until it occurs to me I made a typo.

And it does it for pretty much any bogus query as well, compare:

https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi...

with:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aoeulcrnh34ui345u34iyi3euieuiaeoua...

In this case ddg happily outputs what appears to be misinterpreted binary files.

Maybe DDG works well for non-technical contents but 90% of my queries at work are obscure programming/electronics stuff, component datasheets and the like. For that ddg is simply not usable by my standards.

[howeyc]

"Mr. Babage if I were to feed wrong inputs to that calculation machine will it still produce correct outputs?"

[untog]

...but Google does do that.

[comex]

That would be more analogous to Google correcting input for perceived spelling errors. Putting in garbage as a query isn't wrong, it has a well-defined answer for the vast majority of garbage.

[vacri]

And yet the commentor is claiming that the other tool is able to produce useful output from those inputs.

[enneff]

"correct" is not equivalent to "helpful"

[KiwiCoder]

The better part of this quote is the sentiment that follows;

I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

[streetnigga]

"Look at this! If I mash gibberish into a search engine it returns the same."

[jck]

I see only one result on DDG for vbuf_queue. Maybe they changed it in the last 4 hours?