Also, I don't use bangs, I use the browser's built-in searches. So, for example, "i <movie name>" will take me to IMDB (actually Rotten Tomatoes nowadays) by searching for "site:imdb.com ! <movie name>" on DDG.
"Mastodon API". DDG does not find the api documentation on the first two screens, on Google spot 1 is the old location of the docs that has a link to the new, spot 2 is the new location of the docs.
"Mastodon API documentation" and DDG understands it too.
The question is: Do you trust a trillion dollar company, with everything to lose if it is revealed that they are misusing user data [1], or do you trust a 50 people team who is trying to get you to switch using FUD techniques.
[1] ..and by the way, have waaay better results than their closest competitor
Lack of personalization is not a "feature" that DDG implemented. It is a lack of feature that they had to justify. The results that they were getting back from Yahoo! BOSS were not personalized, because Yahoo! (and now Bing,) would not trust a third-party with your ID, let alone your data.
More importantly: Google is not selling your info to anyone. They use it to personalize their two main search engines: web and ads. Non-personalized ads means smaller revenue per ad, which in turn means more ads shown to you (which is what you get with DDG.) If you see Google ads on a third-party site, it is still Google that is directly serving those ads, not that site.
Think of it this way: Here is a company that screams that Google is evil, but is happy to provide you with direct functionality ("!g") to visit Google, and oh, by the way, says nothing about their main partner, Bing, that also personalizes results.
On the other hand, look at Google's behavior. They own duck.com through their acquisition of On2. What do they show when you visit duck.com ? "If you meant to visit the search engine DuckDuckGo, click here." Who does that ?!
Brands build trust over many years, and in my (and most of the planet's) opinion, Google has earned mine.
I could be more worried about ISPs logging URLs and selling them, but I'm not: I'm just not that interesting to track and I bet this is true for most of us. Maybe you're different.
For instance - when I google "python" google knows I mean the programming language. For another user, they may mean the snake.
I feel like I have the reverse experience—that only non programming queries work well on DDG. I have literally switched my programming searches a bunch of times today alone, from DDG to Google by simply prepending the !g bang. Google would then give me way better results on the exact same query. This is sometimes I very often end up doing.
I would love to not use Google, so DDG is still my default, but I sure end up there a lot anyways :(
Only if the search query is something trivial as "ruby Array" or "SQL WHERE".
As soon as you ask more general question (yeah, sometimes it is pretty hard to come up with a strict search query) DDG does not understand what the heck do you want to get in return unlike google which as results for a queries similar to the you've provided.
I continue use DDG to support them but I do wish their results were better.
It can be a challenge sometimes to find the right category to activate to get the markers but when using the search box it usually tells you in brackets which category to switch on for more information and it even centers the map for you.
YM(and expectation)MV, obviously.
That's mostly because DDG use Googles API, they don't actually search anything themselves.
DDG says they use "over 400 sources" [1] direct link [2]. They don't mention Google at all.