I switched a couple of times to DDG, and the first few false starts I remember coming away from that thinking Google was just better. This time around, DDG stuck. While DDG has been steadily improving, I think the quality of google results has steadily worsened significantly. The focus on top of the page answers and other changes seem to favor commerce vs information. I was recently researching home WiFi gear reviews and google was adamant that I was actually trying to buy WiFi gear. DDG has some of those results, but I also noticed that actual reviews and forum posts were returned instead of amazon and Best Buy links.
I tried DDG a few time, but Google knew too much about me, my intent and what sites I liked.
Now I find its all ads and other google services.
Thus DDG has become perfectly serviceable now and I am very happy with it.
Although, I have an idea that the web has changed also. Web pages are different, QA sites like StackOverflow have spammed results, the rise and relentless march of commercial focused SEO, and the death of blogs and personal websites has created a real problem in search.
Same for me. I find that Google has gotten worse for me over the last two years, and switched to duck-duck-go. It feels like Google is trying to control me and my searches more than it used to. I like my search engine being a tool, not my mom.
My hope is that one day DDG can have its own crawler to improve upon search results as well. Since atm it just tries results from different engines.
I somewhat wish Microsoft would sponsor DDG but not necessarily a buyout cause people will freak out. Or if they did a buyout that they would do with it as they did with Minecraft. They didnt make things worse just provided more resources to the developers.
In an ideal world someone like Apple could take DDG even but they are so unlikely to but it would further push their privacy branding. Heck DDG now owns duck.com thanks to google... So it could have a sleek marketable name.
I know other people have already echoed your comment, but I feel the same. About a month ago I switched from chrome and google search to firefox and ddg. After about 2 days I completely forgot I was using ddg. It just stuck.
Oh man, I so badly want to use DDG. I was actually using DDG for the past several months and just switched back to Google today. As a developer, I'm constantly searching for things and I just couldn't justify the additional 5-10 seconds it would take me to re-do a search. Say I make 100 searches/day: (.2 * 100 * 7.5)/60 = 12.5min/wk. Not to mention the disruption in flow caused by those repeat searches. I applaud DDG for what they're doing, going up against a behemoth, but I just can't seem to make it work for me.
