Same for me. I've had DDG as the default search engine for a while now. Initially mostly for the instant results and bang shortcuts, but these days I find myself using !g very very rarely.

Same here as well. And I've been finding DDG to even given better results increasingly often, at least on the sample of searches that I've used multiple engines for.

The one thing I really miss is insta-results for things like 'population of USA'. On the other hand, I think Google was going a bit too far with that and started giving insta-results that at times were subjective, or even simply wrong.

Time for the next step: An open source search engine.

I've been using findx.com as my default search engine lately. I still use the find on google option often though, since it's not nearly as good as DDG (There is a search on DDG option next to the Google one as well).