I used DDG for two months and as a developer trying to find the latest bugs, code snippets, and help; It was a lot harder on DDG than in Google. I would always end up having to type google.com <tab> in my address bar to search for programming related items. That being said, people have pointed me to resources to help me improve my search results.
You don't need DDG for that. Both Firefox and Chrome support adding shortcut keywords for search boxes.
For example, in Firefox all you have to do is to right click on a search box and select "Add Keyword for this Search".
It's much better than DDG because:
1) if you care about privacy, then this is obviously the right way, as you don't have to redirect through a third-party's server
2) you can add shortcuts for whatever you want, without being limited to a fixed set. For instance I type "dex someWord" for getting the definition of words in my native language. I type "word hello" for doing a search on wordnik.com. I type "w definition" for Wikipedia. I type "mvn package" for doing a maven package search. I type "gem library" for doing a RubyGems search.
And yeah, it's easier to add a shortcut that's relevant to you, then it is to read that DDG document you linked to.
I haven't played with Firefox keywords really but isn't the saved search still going through whatever the default search engine is (in Firefox, Google)?
[Update] I guess my point is that DDG has it ready to go and the syntax is usually easy enough to figure out without building up one's own keyword list.
Maybe I'm missing something, but it just seems that DDG offers a better solution.
Example: I use the letter 'd' for DDG searches in the address bar. In the "Show all bookmarks" window for the DDG bookmark, I've filled in "Location: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%s" and "Keyword: d" .
When I enter into the address bar: "d turkey trot [return]"
Firefox turns that into "https://duckduckgo.com/?q=turkey trot" and initiates the DDG search.
But you can use the same FF keyword feature to auto-generate a URL for any site. If you go to BoingBoing a lot, you could just enter 'bb [return]'.
[Note: some of the DDG 'bangs' are out of date ... try !js]
I switched to DDG some time ago, and I totally live happy with it. Besides, lately they improved the quality a lot, both on the results and on speed performances.
The bang syntax is just awesome, and I rarely need to !g my results.
I had the same problem. I switched to DDG and Firefox when the PRISM story broke but ended up using !g on so many queries I made Google my default again. I find Google much better when I'm searching for API docs, StackOverflow Q's etc.
