Nothing Can Stop Google. DuckDuckGo Is Trying Anyway

I'm glad DDG exists and it's my main search engine. But I'm using g! in about 50% of my queries.

For very technical queries I somehow already know that google gives me better results at the top. DDG results feel more like a dice roll.

Two things I also miss are "site:url" filters (dont know if ddg provides this) and date ranges, for example results within the last 3 years.

Well, maybe it's possible but I have other things to do than to browse around ddg or learn a bunch of bangs. In my opinion this is the main barrier to entry. Provide me all the possibilities on a single screen or behind a menu and don't expect user to dig around the docs. There's a lot of potential which will never be uncovered by alot of users, so they stick to google.

I'm going to focus mostly on their SE. Google's success is hugely based off their years and years of data collection, meaning no company starting now will ever catch up. I understand that history has shown how unlikely it is for a company to truly be unmatched, but when huge sample sizes of data that can only be accrued with time and no other means comes into play, the situation is different.

This issue of time is made even worse knowing that Google's engine would be a pain to try and recreate, given their decades of optimization. If you're someone who A) wants to match google's data and B) catch up to the competency of their search engine, you're looking at 20+ years of work all while google continues to improve their current search engine. Many PhD's have gone into ensuring Google's SE is perfect down to every last decimal point. It would actually be impossible to make an exact copy without direct theft.

"Google will fall once something usurps their dominant platform advantage ( chrome/search/android )."

I question whether this is a matter of "when" or whether it's actually a big "if". People will be able to provide alternatives to google but i don't think there will ever be another google.

Given that google also fails to give me the result I want at least 5% of the time, I guess nothing is good enough.

DDG = Bing for most of the queries in US. You are basically using bing and 95% of the time and happy with it. Good I guess.

Back in the day, before I just defaulted to using Google, I remember checking multiple search engines to find the thing I was looking for. You'd check Yahoo/Google/Lycos, try a couple of different phrasings, and then if that didn't work try searching on a few other search engines. Somewhere along the way, Google had won me over, because I almost always found my answer. I had stopped even considering other search engines.

Now that I'm on DDG, I find that I'm following a similar pattern of searching DDG, then searching google, and I'm finding that most of my searches work great on DDG. What's surprising to me is that when I move on to using Google, I'm considering widening my search even beyond DDG and Google. It feels like, by considering different search options, I'm going back to how I used to explore the internet, rather than defaulting to taking Google's results as truth.

And now, seeing a variety of options from DDG, I am surprised at how irrelevant some of the links are on Google some times. It feels like when I search on Google, Google is telling me 'No no, you don't care about JsonAPI parsing performance, you care about parsing json, because we know best'.

I'm glad that DDG is alive and doing well. I love using it and I don't notice any difference for most queries, and falling back to google hasn't really been as painful as I thought it would be.