I find the results worse, especially for the technical stuff I have to deal with most of the day.
However the ! commands are what keep me using DDG. They're a gamechanger.
However the ! commands are what keep me using DDG. They're a gamechanger.
The only times I resort to Google are for recent news searches, search by image and times when even Startpage does not provide adequate results (I don't understand why that happens since Startpage is a proxy for Google). The "site:" searches still seem to work better with Google.
Additionally, I also don't like the way the search result links in DDG get selected when using the arrow keys (similar to caret browsing mode) instead of scrolling the page. This becomes more of an annoyance when the mouse cursor is already somewhere on the screen and a search result gets highlighted unintentionally. I found this behavior can be changed by turning off the "Keyboard shortcuts" setting (under "General" settings), but I don't like saving search engine settings, and feel this default is not a good choice. Not sure if others find it extremely useful.
Overall I find DDG good enough most of the time, though. The main thing Google still seems to do better is heuristically figuring out vague queries or queries for not quite the right term, as well as word-sense disambiguation.