Duck Duck Go = Perfect search engine for programmers

I like Duck Duck Go. Mostly because, there is someone out there who is courageous enough to give it a go, single-handedly, into the search engine market. So props to him, I can support someone like him.<p>Having said that. There can be too much of a good thing. I feel that HN is being used as an advertising platform to promote DDG, which in itself is not such a bad thing when there are major developments and exiting features and news about it once in a while. So can we try to go easy on this promotional bandwagon?

It's not perfect yet, but I'd really like to get there: <a href="http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/hack-hack-go.htm...</a><p>Here's what's coming:<p>--Stack Overflow, man pages &#38; programming documentation in 0-click.<p>--More programming !bangs; I've already added a bunch but would love more suggestions: <a href="http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html" rel="nofollow">http://duckduckgo.com/bang.html</a><p>--More goodies; I've added a lot recently (color codes, regexp, more advanced math to wolfram alpha, today unicode); again, suggestions welcome: <a href="http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html" rel="nofollow">http://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html</a>

ddg is quite nice when you're searching in languages with a relatively simple morphology. For English, I'm not using google any more unless ddg tells me to do so :)<p>It is very easy to perform shallow parsing operations on English, because of its relatively simple morphology. However, for agglutinative languages like Turkish, (Finnish, Hungarian and Japanese are also in the same family) where stems can appear under too many forms to enumerate, basic shallow parsing algorithms would not produce as interesting search results.<p>My anecdotal experience with DDG in Turkish seems to go in line with that assumption. So, I think DDG has a lot room for improvement in processing languages with complex morphology.<p>==================<p>A famous illustrative Turkish word is: uygarlaştıramadıklarımızdanmışsınızcasına<p>...which decomposes to suffixes as follows: uygar+laş+tır+ama+dık+lar+ımız+dan+mış+sınız+casına<p>...and translates to english as follows: behaving as if you(plural) are among those whom we could not cause to become civilized

I am current taking the search engine for a spin and it has made a great first impression. I particularly like that instead of paging the search results it displays the results on demand using ajax. I prefer this interface because with less effort I see more results. I've found that with Google I tend to not to move past the first page and by doing that I probably miss out on information that may have been useful to me.<p>I wonder if Google has ever considered a similar interface for their search results.

When I tried out DuckDuckGo about a year ago, I noticed it was really good for general queries, but always had to go back to Google when I searched for compiler error messages or other programming-related things. Because of this, I eventually slipped back into full-time Googleage, despite giving DDG a try for about a month and a half.

Perfect for programmers? I was skeptical. Then I searched for A* (which doesn't work on Google). Perfect indeed!

When I first heard about DDG it was because of it's privacy. I couldn't care less for that.<p>Now, saying that it is good for <i>programming</i> questions made me set it as the default search engine without even testing.<p>Zero-click info is amazing for quick doc checks, the auto-extending page is sweet and actually displaying the page link and favicon is a lot more informative.<p>Two things though:<p>- It's slow. Maybe because I'm in South America, or the server is not that good, but speed is essential for a search engine.<p>- Special characters are not always handled correctly. A* work perfectly, but the situation is inverted when it comes to "@". Google's results for @override (<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=@override" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=@override</a>) are better than DDG's (<a href="http://duckduckgo.com/?q=@override" rel="nofollow">http://duckduckgo.com/?q=@override</a>).

I like DDG, but the last time I used it I had to fall back to Google to find an answer to my question. I was trying to find the date at which the central bank of Canada was going to make its next rate announcement. I knew it was June, used the most obvious keywords, but didn't find a good answer with DDG. With Google it was in the top 10.<p>Not a huge problem. It works most times when I use it. But it's not quite Google yet.

Is DDG completely independent or does it pull in results from other search engines, like a meta search engine? Does it do its own spidering?

As a win32 programmer, I always try things like createwindowex and I expect to get msdn as it is the most informative page. I can get it on DDG (doesn't even, show up ). It's the first result on google, even if I mistype it like createwindowe or createwindoaexaze. But may be I'm a dinosaur.

And FYI in Chrome you can set it to use DDG for search instead of Google (they actually have quite a number of choices).

"Privacy -Your searches are private! I don’t need to say more"<p>Well ... they are now