I'd say it's improving for different categories of searches. Because for a long time users were largely technical, it's search for tech stuff has been pretty good for a long time (in general, there are a few sub-categories in that that have lagged[1]). Where, searching for an author or book might have terrible results. So, when these people say it has improved, they mean it has improved for the kind of searches that that person does. As more people use it, and suggest improvements[2], it will approach being good for all kinds of searches.

[1] It still isn't very good at searching for specific error messages. It definitely used to show obscure projects on GitHub way too often. You'd do a search for 'getty' and some 3-commit project with a name containing getty would be the first hit. Also, I think it's actually gotten worse at finding Rails API stuff.

[2] It's been a while since I tried, but if you tweet at them with a search term with a poor result, they will try to figure out how to tweak the algorithm to make it better. It's really cool to see them act so directly on your suggestions.

I wonder if there's an element of users learning how to optimize their query for Duck Duck Go. I've been using it as a default for some months now, but I often fall back to Google for software error message strings and other things.

I don't think it was _terrible_.

It just doesn't give as accurate results as Google in some searches, I assume due to the rafts of information collected about users - a trade off I will make happily.

It's not even that they're less accurate, I think for a lot of searches we expect certain results.

If the search engine isn't giving me results I expect isn't that the same if not worse than it being inaccurate? If I type cucumber in google, it knows since I'm always search technical information I probably mean Cucumber BDD and it gives it to me as the second result right after the wikipedia article about the gourd, that's what I expect. DDG, however, having no clue who I am, gives me 8 results about the gourd before finally, below the fold mind you, giving me Cucumber BDD.

That's like searching for CakePHP by typing "cake", or for information on french braids by typing "french".

I don't expect my search engine to be staffed by psychics, or people who have gone through my emails and bookshelves. That's the problem, really.

But having a search engine staffed by psychics is almost undeniably more useful.

Certainly more creepy, and not a tradeoff many people would be willing to make, but incredibly useful.

Ah but Google does return me CakePHP if I search cake (and CoffeeScript for some reason, coffee and cake go together I guess I dunno). I don't agree with your example about french braids, at some point you are getting a little too generic.

It's definitely uncomfortable, I don't know if it's better or worse but for me I couldn't adjust and found myself going through !g until I just switched back.

You're fooling yourself. Google and Startpage return Cucumber BDD as a second result whether you're logged in or not. And in foreign countries such as France, it's even the first result.

Compare to Bing: in France, "cucumber" returns a porn(!) site as the first result (note: I don't visit porn sites or use bing).

DuckDuckGo and Bing simply aren't good enough, but it has nothing to do with whether they respect your privacy.