If you can't use it for all sites you want to search, then what's the point? I'm sure python isn't the only site with a bad search.

It just seems he used a useless search on purpose. The !w for wikipedia searches and the !v for youtube searches are as awesome as the !python is lame.

Or he is a Python developer(I know I work with him). Searching the python docs or the Internet for some module is a pretty common use case.

True, but I think DDG is smart to pursue the bigger market of "people who want to find stuff on wikipedia, youtube, and google image search" and wait for DuckDuckHack to come up with a plugin that does skillful python searches.

Should plugins really be necessary? What would a plugin bring to the table that searching "python whatever" doesn't?

I really have to ask if your point is that because a feature isn't universally useful it's automatically pointless?

I think that the approach that DDG is taking is wrong. Relying upon individual sites search engines isn't going to lead to uniform results because they are always going to vary in quality.

I don't see that they realistically have an alternative.

DuckDuckGo won't ever be able to compete with Google as a general search engine. Google already pretty much solved that problem, and even if they haven't they have a huge head start and a much bigger bankroll. If DuckDuckGo is going to succeed on it's search principles it's going to be as a curated search engine. That's a game where they can still compete with Google.

I completely agree with you about the lack of uniformity in search results. Curation is hard. It requires that a good source exist, that the curators are aware of it, and that it's amenable to being added to your system (technically and legally). Only one of these is under the direct control of the curators.

The reason the Python search sucks in DuckDuckGo the people running the curated Python search have a crappy search engine. Obviously either a better choice doesn't exist (probable), the DuckDuckGo curators don't know about it (very likely), or the better source isn't technically or legally accessible to the DDG curators (unlikely but possible).

Unlike the problems of a crawling and building general search index (where even to enter the market you need to have a massive infrastructure investment), these smaller problems of curation are attackable by a smaller team with limited resources. To improve the search results for !python they won't need to re-engineer their entire crawl/index infrastructure, they will simply need to pick a better third-party source once they are aware of it existing.

But look at a query like "!hoogle (a->b) -> [a] -> [b]". That's a search on the type of a function, and I'd have to go to hoogle first, then search it from there. This adds value greater than the drawback of not using !python, or hitting the back button and deleting the ! when I forget