I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost a year now. I still need to resort to !g for about 1/3 of my queries, which is less than it used to be, so the quality is definitely improving.
One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining.
If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")
That's not necessarily true. They could use a classifier to figure out the subject of the query (e.g. programming, cooking, travel) and then modify the query sent to Bing or whatever backend they use. Bonus points if they actually expose this on the UI, in a way that allows you to remove the personalization
They wouldn't be monitoring. You'd explicitly tell them what personalizations you want, and that would be stored in your machine via a cookie that you can delete at will (just like the color scheme/font)
It could either be a power user setting hidden away (like color scheme currently is), or it could be exposed on the SERP interface via a prompt: "Set JavaScript as your default programming language?" "Set vegan as your default diet?" etc
They already do something like this because if you search "array reverse" or any programming question then you get a Q/A tab with stackoverflow almost always at the top.
I do agree with the comment on needing a way to specify a topic, however, in my experience of 4-5 years on DDG, I have nothing but grief with Google search. It tries too much to guess what I am looking for on the internet and ends up being unhelpful and frustrating.
One weird thing that I noticed is that every so often when I'm in a Google SERP (e.g. in a friend's phone) and I'm not fully satisfied with the results, I add in !g, only to realize that makes no sense. So I wonder if there's a subset of queries that DDG produces better results for, or if Google's search quality is declining.
If anyone from DDG is reading this: Please add the ability to (voluntarily) personalize search results via a cookie, just like you do for the interface theme. Something like "Programming Language: JavaScript". That way ambiguous queries (e.g "array reverse") can be associated with the specific context without having to type it every time (e.g. "array reverse js")