[eggie]

I know you're probably annoyed that I'm telling you that you're using ddg wrong. That's not exactly what I'm saying. It's more like: we're trained to expect certain things from the search engine, and so it's hard to switch.

> Or consider how "elm dict" in Google takes me to https://package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/core/latest/Dict (#1 result), but https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elm+dict&t=h_&ia=web in DDG doesn't (nowhere on page 1).

ddg gives me the source code to elm Dict (8th hit, so it's in the first page): https://github.com/ivanov/Elm/blob/master/libraries/Dict.elm

I assume it's the same because ddg is claiming not to affect search results by anything except time and user configuration.

Google's results (for me) are a full page of references to every different version of elm's documentation for dict. Not exactly a wide net, and frankly pretty redundant. To see anything else, I have to click at the bottom of the page. It doesn't show me the source code. I went through the first ten pages and didn't see any link to it.

For ddg, I just use the arrow key to scroll down, and I can press enter to follow the link I want, changing the meaning of "first search page" for me quite a bit.

> DDG results are so much worse for me, especially anything longer tail or in Spanish, that I switch to Google when I'm actually getting work done. I find myself adding "!g" to an important search just to check for any results that DDG doesn't know about and it's almost always an upgrade to see Google's results.

I have a completely different experience in italian. They're actually pretty good, which is surprising given the small audience.

For work, usually I directly search for documentation in reference systems (e.g. en.cppreference.com). Neither ddg or google will consistently direct me to the "best" documentation. YMMV.

[inciampati]

A comment on my comment. It is really true that Google indexes the deep web of generated content (like AliExpress, eBay, and others) better than ddg. That's part of the long tail that's costly to cover.