Interesting, I actually find that I use !g less and less and when I do I often don't get what I'm looking for either (probably because I'm not searching for the right thing in the first place). On top of that I vastly prefer ddg's very simple and terse output compared to Google's many widgets displaying all kinds of content inline and wasting monitor real estate.

>Side note, if they get bought out by a big player, I will feel like my use of them for the last year has been for naught.

I completely agree and at this point it's my main issue with DDG. I don't think their business model is sustainable, if they ever make it big the pressure to make more money will eventually corrupt their noble goals. After all Do No Evil used to be a thing at Google too and we see how that turned out.

I'd gladly pay a subscription to a good search engine to remove the need for ads and align the business model to the privacy goals, however I'm probably in a small minority here.