I’ve been using DuckDuckGo since Google starting requiring you to link your YouTube account. While it’s mainly a matter of privacy for me, I do find DuckDuckGo returns a lot less spammy advertising / commercial search results when I’m looking for actual information.
The DuckDuckGo site has some very interesting stuff if you look around the policy and such links on their home page – stuff like:http://donttrack.us/.
What I hate is how even putting things in quotes doesn’t guarantee your search won’t get altered. Real life example:
“Smith-Jones”
First few hits:
Smith & Jones
Full Service Marting + Advertising Agency - smith + jones - Incline …
smith&jones | idea agency
Alas Smith and Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alias Smith and Jones - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Etc. etc.
None of which do me any good if I’m looking for the exact phrase “Smith-Jones”. If the hyphen wasn’t important I wouldn’t have put it in quotes. What I’d like see is a checkbox in advanced search that tells Google that exact phrase means EXACT PHRASE, punctuation and all. And if there is no match, then tell me there’s no match.
What happened to the link to a cached page?
It was really useful for newspaper articles and other transient pages. Do they no longer cache searched pages? Is there some change in options I am missing?
I feel less and less like I am being served the results I want, and more and more like I am being served the results that Google wants me to see. This is why I switched from Alta Vista to Google a dozen years ago.
It seems to be another PITA “improvement.”
On my screen (Firefox/NoScript) I get a small double arrow or something to the right of the result when I hover in the area. Beyond that is a big-assed waste of space. But when you hover, you get a preview of the page and the ‘cached’ link is there. YMMV.
I love when they fix non-broken shit.
They’ve been doing this for a long time though. I can’t search for my name because it’s a common word as well as a surname. I get all sorts of stuff if I search that way. I’ll get Edward’s Head, Edward[,] Head, Edward; Head, and all sorts of other crap. I do wish they had an exact first then tell me there’s nothing like that.
Good luck, indeed. Seems they oftentimes just copy Google’s results.
I had no idea it could be turned off … thanks!
I’ve learned to work around Google Instant, but it’s often an annoyance. It can sometimes save keystrokes for simple searches, but that’s the best I can say for it.
Excellent posting. I found where they hid Cached Page after some experimentation, but it’s more of a PITA now.
Am I missing something about Instant? I have it turned off, I just checked, but I still get a drop down menu of new hints as I type. Every so often it pops up and gives me the wrong search. Is this instant or something else?
That’s not instant - it’s just a search suggestion. Instant is where you actually see the entire page of results as you are typing your query, generated on the fly with each new letter you type as it attempts to guess what you’re going for.
By the way, another way to avoid Instant if you don’t like it - if you use Chrome (which you should, because Chrome is awesome) you can just type search terms directly into the address bar. That doesn’t invoke Instant. Even if you’re on an inferior browser, you should have a search bar somewhere on your browser as a plug-in - if you are conducting searches by first going to google.com and then typing them in there, you are doing it wrong.
Hey, I like starting out at Google.com 
One thing about those search taskbars – they sometimes leave too much of a trail of what I searched. I can always nuke what I search on Google.com by clearing History (yes, I still msotly use Internet Explorer, the horror :eek: ). I’m sure with the right taskbar and the right “housekeeping” habits, I might be able to do a little better … but :shrug:
At least you aren’t trying to hide that you are a shill for Google.
I’m just happy as can be with Opera, but thanks anyway.
And a special thanks to Rhythmdvl for showing me where to find the cached page link. What a PITA is right.
Shill isn’t accurate, but I’ll take fanboy. 
I had more respect for you when I thought you were profiting on it.
Seriously, five six years ago I was right there. The past two years they have shifted out of my comfort zone. It happens. Could be that I, and people like me, are just not the market any more. Sad fact of life but it happens. If there are enough of us, something will come along to serve our desires. If not, we will have to adapt.
That’s the thing – their market is people who will respond to targeted advertising. That’s not me, either, so they just plain don’t care what we think.
I sure hope some Googler get the idea to have the Google logo changed for a day to a shark jumping over the Google logo.
Why is it that adding terms to a search increases the number of results instead of narrowing them? If I search for oregon mushroom hunting, it returns 83,100 results. But if I add a word, say, oregon mushroom hunting festival, it returns 1,050,000 results. Why is that helpful?
It’s defaulting to the OR operator. YMMV, but that matches my personal preference–I wouldn’t want to type OR between each word. This is why the loss of ‘+’ is a bit vexing.
And that would be fine if it stuck. But my settings keep going back to default. Apparently the only way to get it to stay how you put it is to make Google your homepage.
Not to mention having to sign in every time I use a public computer.