Today I had a nice surprise.
I was checking if anyone on the web has talked about my little free software project, seq2vid, in the past month.
I usually do it with a quick search on DuckDuckGo. I type seq2vid !gmonth in the search box of my Firefox browser, and hit enter…
… which means, I ask DuckDuckGo to redirect me to a Google search where the search options are set to show only results from the past month. I do all this by a simple !gmonth keyword in my search term. This is why I love DuckDuckGo so much: It makes web searching so much faster with a myriad of useful keywords (or bangs, as DuckDuckGo calls them).
But Google only found one result. Which inclined me to try something else. Why not trying a native DuckDuckGo search with !month instead of !gmonth?!
Which brought me the surprise! DuckDuckGo found about 100 results! Many of them where partly matching phrases like seq2 or seq2v, but there were some genuine results from people mentioning my little old seq2vid project ? that Google could not find.
This means, at least in this very case, DuckDuckGo’s index of the web is more up-to-date than Google’s. Given the resources of Google, I honestly find this really surprising.
I already liked DuckDuckGo before. I like it because it doesn’t store my search terms (or so it claims) and because it is a fast and powerful gateway to other search engines. However, I only occasionally used its native search index. Now, I feel it is a serious contender for Google in the last possible way, indexing the web, and I am of course very happy about it!