I use DDG out of principle but to be honest Google is still much better for the stuff I am searching.
Quora is another good example, it’s a place I often visit after search results, but on google.dk, it’s almost never a result, possibly because it’s not in danish.
DDG is much better, but once in a while when I’m searching for something very specific that I know google will first, I’ll do the !g.
If I’m looking up anything technical or comitting an act of google programming, I’ll always go straight to google.
The other day I was looking for some pipeextenders for our shower though, and neither bing, google or DDG were able to help. I ended up finding them by searching on amazon. Google was 100% commercials for plumbers and completely useless otherwise. DDG and bing had no clue what I was looking for. A few years ago, google would have been able to help, I know, because google helped me find our current ones.
What do you see when you google pipeextender ?
On the other hand, when I expect my search engine to make a best effort guess about my intentions, I just use the !g bang, and almost always Google finds stuff that DDG misses. This is essential for research, but downright annoying otherwise (especially considering all the linkfarms like WikiHow that have spammed their way to the top of PageRank).
I'm quite a privacy-conscious individual but I'm not going to significantly hamper my engineering abilities to prevent google from knowing what technical problems I'm having.