I want to make the switch.
But typing "!g" when a search does not return what I want is too clumsy. It requires 7 touch-events on mobile (including focus and space).
Please make that simpler, and I will switch.
(My suggestion would be to have a "!g" button at the bottom of the search results. Perhaps make it optional, depending on user-settings; I don't mind a cookie for just that.)
Part of the issue is you search differently with Google. Most users treat their keywords as circles in a venn diagram - the top result being the center.
Try being a little more explicit with DDG. Add the year a movie came out, the first and last name of a person + their title if it's a common name, things like that.
Also an aside, "!s" routes through startpage, which proxies a google search for you - much more private but still leveraging the Pagerank algorithm.
But ... this also means that a DDG search would work well on Google. So a revert-to-Google button could help people make the transition. I suppose that people will become more and more specific in their queries until at some point they never need to hit that "!g" button anymore.
At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.
However, on Google you do get an identifier next to the result that shows whether your term is missing from the page or not which allows for weeding out "unrelated" results relatively quickly. It also has the "must include" link so that you can narrow your searches without having to retype the query.
Doing the same search on DDG just shows some results but it's not clear whether my specific terms are on the page or not.
Dog Cat
Will return results for Dog OR Cat
To force to AND one has to quote every word, thus:
"Dog" "Cat"
Which is tedious especially on mobile.
I don't know why they think people would want to default to OR.
So I believe that there is a consensus that using IP addresses to improve search results would be fair game for DDG. It's also consistent with the DDG promise: "we don't track you".
OTOH, not using them has only marginal effect on user's privacy: (a) DDG doesn't serve ads anyway, and (b) the metadata of user's online activity are still available to three-letter agencies to analyze.
Also IP by itself isn't really that much of a privacy problem. It only becomes a problem when it's used in the process of delinkage of more sensitive information
Bringing all the result pretending everyone lives in US sounds like a crappy strategy.
DuckDuckGo is Google before it started down this path. You have to be specific. The more words you provide, the smaller the set of possible answers, and the more likely your answer is at the top.
Google, these days, tends to report the same number of results no matter how specific you get. It used to get smaller the more words you put in. It's a philosophical difference. Google assumes you only have a vague idea of what you're looking for and is increasingly confident it knows best.
DuckDuckGo starts with the same assumption, but trusts you to refine your own query without the help of a global network of patterns acting on data. That doesn't work too well on Google now. You're just as likely to trigger an anti-bot check refining queries as you are to find what you're looking for.