I really have to applaud your efforts on that front. I've been using duckduckgo on and off for some time now and I must say I'm mighty impressed. The best part is the keyboard style navigation and the big clean look. Always retain those two. :)

I've used Duck Duck Go a bit and the results are okay. Maybe just a shorter URL would be awesome (such as ddg.com ddgo.com, etc...).

Here is a search that I have had problems with :

octave "--eval"

Your site does pretty well with this (fourth link is somewhat relevant).

I was searching for a way to enable/find the chat logs for Microsoft Communicator which we've recently switched to at work.

Google was basically filled with dead end forum postings and SEO spam.

DuckDuckGo was more helpful and brought me to the MS TechNet article with full documentation on MS Communicator Policy configuration.

Bing was surprisingly the most helpful and brought me to the Communicator Team posting from 2008 which shows me where I should have been able to find the logs.

It looks like my work has blocked/disabled this feature on a global setting even though I haven it enabled locally.

There is one change that gets me often. Using a hyphenated-word used to require that the two words occur in order, although it would also match the two words joined together. It also used to turn off stemming.

Previously it was equivalent to ("hyphenated word" OR +hyphenatedword). But now it seems to behave almost the same as the unquoted (hyphenated word).

Just to make matter worse, when I tried out my example just now I found that the first result (a wikipedia page) for "hyphenated word" doesn't even include the phrase!

I hate searching google for technical jargon (and its worse the more technical the jargon is). Usually google just gives you a bunch of academic papers (in case you are wondering academic papers do not actually explain anything, they just use a bunch of jargon in a plausible way). Gee thanks. If you want I will think up an example.

One feature I use a lot from google is the cache, just to avoid websense at work.

Wow, that's amazing. I think I'll be using this a little more often.

Notably, you return a result for a specific osCommerce error message that I wrote about a while back (!); Google doesn't even know I exist.

I've been using duckduckgo; very nice. One UI comment: when I click on "More Links" I'd like some kind of cue -- say, a horizontal line -- so I know where to start looking when the results come back. I frequently click for "More" then while that's loading I go look at another tab. When I return to Ducky it's sometimes difficult to separate the new results from ones I've looked at (but not clicked on) before.

You might try to track page age; some of the results I get are from 5 years ago and as noted by others, aren't always useful today. But that's a harder problem for another time.