I agree completely, but because no other engine provides decent results while indexing so much, there's really no viable alternative right now. DDG is good for very mainstream things, but does not do a good job of finding user profile page X on site Z, etc.

All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior.

The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these?

The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.

Duckduckgo's innovations are pretty cool, especially bang-commands (to search on google maps, add "!m" to your query).

But the underlying search is Bing.

Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)

I came to the same conclusion after switching from google to duck duck go for 2 months. I found what I was looking for faster with google.

"a simple massage of the URL works well"

As does prefixing your search with "!g".

Well, I'll be jiggered.

maybe I'm just used google's crap, but after using DDG for a week, I found that it gave results that i didnt want more often.

Then again, maybe it is just the interface, Google has a cleaner interface IMO making it easier to see results.

And its also likely that i didnt get used to some of the special additions in DDG like tags and what ever else.

Google results have always been crap, they were just 'less crap' than other search engines until the past couple of years, where Google has been overwhelmed by spammers and, frankly, is losing that battle.

So there is Blekko (http://blekko.com) which does use what we (yes I work there) consider better social signals for ranking search. Try this and let me know what you think:

Go to blekko.com, enter your two words and append /monte to the search. That will put three columns up, results from Blekko, Google, and Bing. Pick the column with the best search results and see which service delivered them.

It is a great way to see what is what.

Interesting.

Blekko was a distant third for my go-to search engine confuser "ruby god" in the three-engine monte, and I was going to write it off for my purposes when it occured to me to try "god /ruby", which to your credit is much closer to being competive with google, and drastically outperforms bing.

Never had any issue. Give some examples of what doesn't seem to work for you.

Your results are likely to be different because of Google's practice of "personalizing" results based upon the consumer's profile. Any discussion of the quality of Google's results should be preceded with "For me."

That's a cop out. Provide examples, on a clean browser/incognito/no cookies/etc