That seems like a good approach until you consider that you don’t know whether the results are unsatisfactory if you aren’t looking at both sets of results on each search. You can’t see what you don’t look at and you can’t know what you don’t know. Google may have a better result for you, but how would you know unless you search both engines?

Like I mentioned though, with no dates every page is unsatisfactory. I’m not gonna waste time clicking each link to look at the date before I devote time to reading it

I was doing g! at work for tech searches so often I switched back. I gave it several months of effort. One example, I was googling an AWS service related question and the front page was blogs and garbage. g! had the official docs at the relevant part as the first result.

This happens way too often, and I like to think not because of personalized results.

You could use s! As an alternative to startpage (which serves google results but without google directly tracking you)

I've been using ddg as default for over year now. But I do pull Google results when querying documentation.

And you can get to startpage by doing !s instead of !g.

One problem I wish Google would solve is this. When I'm looking to solve a problem I've found that tons of first page results are dated but years. Adobe cc for example, they are churning updates, lots of people are having the same issues once I actually go to Adobe but the results are sometimes a decade old!

Just to be clear (since downvotes and replies suggest I wasn't) my point is that if you're using a technology where anything written two years ago is out of date and now useless information, maybe instead of using a search engine that shows newer information you should rather prefer to use technologies where ten-year-old information is still relevant. I'm pretty sure anything I read about TeX today is going to continue to be useful information ten years from now. Not so much anything I read about Kubernetes or the non-relational database du jour. (Which is why I prefer not needing to read about those things ever.)

Decentraleyes and Ublock Origin will block the vast majority of tracking beacons you encounter from FANG sites.

I'm not personally as worried about being tracked by Google APIs, but UMatrix will still block the majority of them -- even Youtube embeds and many Google fonts. That means you get to choose which sites are allowed to load those APIs, which is a huge improvement over just giving Google access to everything.

Honestly, while fingerprinting is still a huge concern, blocking the majority of Google's tracking on 3rd-party sites is pretty easy, since Google tracking is served from consistent domains.

The remaining pain points are stuff like reCaptcha and AMP, which are obviously a big problem, but are not used universally enough to erase the privacy gains you'll get by switching off of Gmail and Google search.

If you're already running a (good) adblocker, you will genuinely be tracked less if you switch off of Google. There are ways to mess that up and erase those gains (cough running stock Android with default settings cough), but it's very feasible for most tech-literate people to reduce Google tracking right now.

At the moment I use DDG for search, Firefox, privacy badger extension and a good vpn as well as keeping a separate browser for facebook or google sites. I switched from android to ios because I preferred Apple’s stance on privacy.

There is lots more that could be done but small, incremental changes do add up over time.

You don't search the web using news sites.

Part of it is how you phrase searches.

I mainly use DDG, but whenever I have to go to !g, I find I get better results if I phrase it like a brain damaged lunatic who can't spell and didn't start thinking about the query until two words in. I believe it keeps Google happy, if you throw it a little bone by letting it second-guess your query. Make it feel all smart and artificially intelligent, so it gives you the good results.

In DDG I usually just enter some keywords.

Anecdata: people are spoiled with google. Context-aware search queries are rampant in younger folks.

Older G users also rely on it but to a lesser extent. Having a couple weeks of appending !g when a search query does not match eventually hits the spot where "hey, they actually don't know what I'm thinking now".

Not this.

When using DDG a couple of years back, I noticed that after a while, throwing in a !g became my default so I figured I might as well switch back to Google. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to love DDG but for my searches, I would simply have to revert to Google too often.

I don’t buy this at all. I get much better results from Google compared to DDG even when I’m using Tor.

Google just has a really good results, it’s not that they’re customized for me.

Unfortunately DDG of late has been very poor for me, and I'm not convinced it has anything to do with tracking. For example, if I'm searching for a store to buy something and the first term in the search query is my country, returning me no results at all on the first page that are stores in that country (when several such stores exist) is literally useless, and clearly DDG could have done better.

They aren't just less relevant - they are less complete. One specific example: their coverage of academic sites. As an experiment, I have entered the titles of several papers and they failed to show up in the results.

It's not just academic journal articles either: their results are, by and large, less complete - it's what initially led me to do the experiment in the first place.