So yeah, DDG is basically unusable for me, at least for these types of use cases. I get the privacy benefits but IMO if a search engine is failing at its core job then everything else is pointless.
Yeah I mostly try to use DDG but I find that if my query has any implicit grammar (eg phrased as a question, or contains verbs) and not just independent search terms, then Google will get it and DDG won't find it at all.
Lots of !g and I don't try to use it on mobile yet.
I'm confused. When I run your DDG query, the first result is the github page, and the second result is the docs. So same top two as Google, but flipped. I find that acceptable. Maybe one of us is in some A/B bucket?
Very interesting. I see almost what bgaluszka sees, but the first two results flipped. I know they basically blend a couple search engine's results together, so they must experiment with different combinations.
This is the reason I've somewhat recently switched to Searx - I've not had to run any !g searches, as I did when I was using DDG, but my privacy remains intact.
This is where !g comes in handy. In my experience how you search ddg is a bit different from how you search google and it may require some time to get used to but for me what ddg offers is far more interesting than what google does e.g. consistent results, privacy, ability to forward my search request to other search engines.
I tried the query several times and got a few slightly different results, at one point getting something similar (but not identical) to enraged_camel's results. Most of the time it shows me what everyone else is reporting, but "consistent" might not be a good description here.
For example, when I want to search for the documentation for the Ecto library in Elixir, I search for "elixir ecto" on Google:
https://www.google.com/search?q=elixir+ecto
Top result is what I want. Second result is the Github page. Third result is the wiki on Github.
Perfect.
This is what I get for the same search result on DDG:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ecto+elixir
Totally irrelevant results. Why isn't DDG able to deduce what I'm actually searching for?
Even when I search explicitly for "elixir ecto docs" I still don't get the results I want:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ecto+elixir+docs&ia=web
So yeah, DDG is basically unusable for me, at least for these types of use cases. I get the privacy benefits but IMO if a search engine is failing at its core job then everything else is pointless.