Like a few other comments here, I switched to ddg a few months ago and only rarely need to go back to google. In fact, it's kind of nice to have a few places to search now (google, bing, ddg), reminds me of the old internet search engine war days.

Unlike the article, I didn't do it for security reasons, I actually gave it a go and found the search results better for most of the things I search for. And if I don't find what I want I can !g and it'll take me right to google's results so I get a direct like-for-like comparison.

I also generally like how DDG presents the results better than google. Little details like checkboxes next to places I've already been are super helpful and I miss those little touches in google. There's tons of little touches like that all over DDG.

I find about 1:30 searches I hit google for and maybe only half of those do I find anything anyway.

About the only think I don't like about DDG is the image search, google is far superior here still. And google sometimes does a better job bringing up maps of places I'm searching for. But I don't see changing back anytime soon and getting better personal security "for free" is a nice side effect.

It also brings into question how important google's personalized searches are for relevancy if DDG can provide equivalent results without needing that information.