You can do your job and type two extra characters, or you could just use it for personal use and not at work. DDG is actually better than google in many cases when it comes to searching for code related things. After a month or so you start to have a sense of what sort of searches need to fall back to using !g (which is pretty much only obscure questions/answers, I find).

If you don't care about your privacy and don't want to dealing with learning a new search engine to the level you've learned google, then this article probably isn't for you.

The idea you wouldn't be able to do your job or that it would be impacted in a nontrivial way by switching to a different search bar in your browser seems ridiculous, correct me if I'm wrong.

You are missing the point.

The point is that with DDG, you have a uniform syntax for searching multiple services that doesn't require any special cooperation from your browser or those services, doesn't require any setup apart from using DDG and only requires you to learn one new concept.

And this will work anywhere where webpages work (like, say, lynx), and will work consistently. There are thousands of !bangs, from things ranging from amazon, to wikipedia, to maps, to dictionary definitions... You aren't limited to a handful of hand picked services that your browser decided to support out of the box, or that you decided to manually configure.

Also, there is generally decent support to switch languages and regions for services that support it. For example, "!w" gets you "wikipedia", "!wsimple" gets you the "Simple English" version and "!wpt" gets you the Portuguese version.

IMHO, this is all extremely convenient.

The thing i really like about bangs is that i can often just assume one exists, with zero setup, across all my devices. I don't search IMDB frequently enough to bother manually adding it in a menu somewhere, but on both desktop and mobile i can do `!imdb Brad Pitt` and get directly where I intended. It also works with less common sites, like I've been using `!stardew` lately to search the Stardew Valley Wiki directly.

The most I've had to do is search the bangs documentation if i can't find the search engine i want. (for Terraria stuff i sometimes wanted `!terrg` rather than `!terraria`, and ended up searching to find the former)