DuckDuckGo is growing fast
I absolutely cannot stand the quality of DuckDuckGo results, programming related or not. I use !g on almost any general search query out of a conditioned lack of faith in the ability of DDG to surface anything useful. The name is childish and doesn’t inspire confidence either.<p>People I encounter that argue the results are “not that bad” are 9/10 times ideological purists, or otherwise misguided, that’s purely my personal experience though.<p>That said, after a few months of frustration I switched my search engine back to Google earlier this year and <i>almost immediately switched it back to DDG</i> the second I needed a bang operator.<p>Bangs are a superpower, a game changer, and by far the best UX for mobile search I’ve seen so far. I bang everything and everyone, bang bang.<p>Googling with site:x.com doesn’t even come close. More characters, Google determines the sorting and mixes in marketing copy results with the UGC I’m looking for, “exact quotes” no longer work, forced AMP results for e.g. Reddit etc.<p>DDG as a search engine is utter crap and I’ve little patience left to hear otherwise, but as a way of turning iOS Safari into a sort of meta search engine it’s invaluable and I genuinely cannot stop recommending it to other “power users”.<p>Gram gram is sticking with google though, and the second Safari replicates bangs I’m outta here.