I'm really amazed by the adoption of DDG by HN crowd. It's totally unusable for me. I can barely find stuff and I have to resort to google in 95% of cases. Do I have to relearn how to goo.. scratch that, duck duck go stuff?
Sort of, yes. See other comments around here as well. It's like Google without the backend which knows your habits and bubble and tries to be smart (and succeeds, often) and figures out what you want to search for despite you being a bit vague. DDG doesn't do that so, like in the old days, you have to be specific. Like if you talk to a person and ask a question: you also don't ask 'pasta?'. You ask 'where can I buy pasta' for instance.
I am sure it’s fine for more evergreen content like SO, but for current news it’s awful.
Ha but my point was just to explain how it works. I've been using DDG for years and find it extremely usable :)
It has improved (UX-wise at least), I've used it occasionally, hope it's also getting better with search -- Google is certainly getting much worse.