Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation.
I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious.
Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-classes of search:
⚫ Google Books. Particularly the Ngram viewer. My frustrations with the company have reached a point that I hate to admit I love any of its products, but I love Google Books search and the Ngram viewer specifically. GBS makes serious amends by having one of the most spectacularly useless and annoying interfaces for actually reading online content. Contrast with the Internet Archive's book reader, which is a thing of joy, beauty, grace, and perfection: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/...
⚫ Google Scholar. I'm not aware of any other resource which has comparably deep coverage of research papers. Again, what the search interface giveth, the content interface taketh away, with the same online reading interface as Google Books, in the rare cases where journal publishers of recent content actually make full text available.
⚫ Date refinement. If DDG offered this my use of Google Search would fall by another 50-75%. Being able to search within specific bounded ranges of time is hugely useful.
⚫ Maps, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Mostly OpenStreetmap though "maps.google.com" is still tied to my muscle memory. Streetview remains tough to beat.
⚫ News, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Twitter's actually pretty good for breaking stuff, with search. Reddit isn't bad as a filter either. I've also got a few conventional news sources (NY Times, Guardian) on my rsstail feeds.
⚫ Financial data, though there are lots of alternatives. This is an area rife with perverse incentives, however, and for the data I'm typically interested in, research tools such as FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis), Wolfram+Alpha (despite its complete and utter lack of a definitive syntax), and upstarts such as Knoema and Gapminder are promising. I believe this period is actually showing signs of being a renaissance in advanced online data analysis and access tools.
Increasingly though, Google's my 2nd or 3rd tier search destination.
Don't forget the best new feature: Google+ integration right in your search results!
Now you can see all the Google+ post blurbs right at the top of your results even if they aren't good ones! Also, Google+ notifications about random people adding you? That's right, it's right at the top of every Google search page with a nice red highlight so you don't miss it!
For numerous reasons, I've adopted a hit-and-run policy for Google services. I'll log in, do my deed (mostly pimping my content posted elsewhere), and log out.
Thankfully this greatly reduces the annoyance of G+ intrusion to all aspects of the Google empire.
I'm dreading the prospect of having to use Google tools in a work environment given the disease.
That's a simple one, I just don't use Google+. I toyed with it for a while and deleted my account. Yes they nag me about joining Google+, but this is it. My search results are clean and no red square.
Agreed on Google Scholar. I actually prefer the interface of Microsoft Academic Search, but the coverage is just not good enough. Google Scholar indexes nearly everything, often within a day or two of it appearing on the internet. Whereas Microsoft has only managed to find about half my papers, and has somehow not managed to find any of them more recent than 2010. That's part of the difficulty in beating Google here, that before you can compete on user experience, you have to at least come close to matching their indexing.
Having used DDG as my primary search engine since June 2013, I prefer its presentation.
I find Google's dynamic "oh, we're going to clear the page while you're refining your search terms to focus on higher relevance based on the results you're looking at now while you're typing that up" particularly egregious.
Google's win right now is in specific categories and sub-classes of search:
⚫ Google Books. Particularly the Ngram viewer. My frustrations with the company have reached a point that I hate to admit I love any of its products, but I love Google Books search and the Ngram viewer specifically. GBS makes serious amends by having one of the most spectacularly useless and annoying interfaces for actually reading online content. Contrast with the Internet Archive's book reader, which is a thing of joy, beauty, grace, and perfection: http://archive.org/stream/industrialrevol00toyngoog#page/n6/...
⚫ Google Scholar. I'm not aware of any other resource which has comparably deep coverage of research papers. Again, what the search interface giveth, the content interface taketh away, with the same online reading interface as Google Books, in the rare cases where journal publishers of recent content actually make full text available.
⚫ Date refinement. If DDG offered this my use of Google Search would fall by another 50-75%. Being able to search within specific bounded ranges of time is hugely useful.
⚫ Maps, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Mostly OpenStreetmap though "maps.google.com" is still tied to my muscle memory. Streetview remains tough to beat.
⚫ News, though I'm finding/researching alternatives. Twitter's actually pretty good for breaking stuff, with search. Reddit isn't bad as a filter either. I've also got a few conventional news sources (NY Times, Guardian) on my rsstail feeds.
⚫ Financial data, though there are lots of alternatives. This is an area rife with perverse incentives, however, and for the data I'm typically interested in, research tools such as FRED (Federal Reserve of St. Louis), Wolfram+Alpha (despite its complete and utter lack of a definitive syntax), and upstarts such as Knoema and Gapminder are promising. I believe this period is actually showing signs of being a renaissance in advanced online data analysis and access tools.
Increasingly though, Google's my 2nd or 3rd tier search destination.