About 2 years ago I tried it and I constantly found myself using !g to get decent results.
Now I only need to use !g some of the time for programming or technical searches. It works great for everything else.
I just wanted to add this because I was anti-DuckDuckGo for awhile until I recently retried it.
I think a lot of people try out DDG, see some sites they don't recognize and then dismiss it as producing bad results because they are not Google results. We basically trained ourselves to use Google as the benchmark for what a search engine should produce - not in general terms of reliability of information but exact results. Then something else doesn't produce those same results and it's crap. Or, for a particular query, the top Google result is the best and the second or third DDG result is the best and that makes it crap. Search has always been a little bit of an art where you have to learn how to do it effectively and how to quickly parse your results.
I use Google maybe a handful of times a year and I would rarely find better results over there. It got to the point where I really didn't like their result page at all compared to DDG. It seemed spammy and it was difficult to parse. For a long time, they were fiddling around with things like displaying the full URL or making ads look more like legitimate results. On the other hand, DDG was doing things like zero click info and instant answers. I came to prefer their results much better. I showed up for the privacy and after a little while I stayed because it worked better.
I have tried Google a few times recently and they are doing some cool stuff with their results page. I particularly like the "featured snippets" and "people also ask" sections. Featured snippets is similar to DDG's zero click stuff, but it works with more complex queries like "best travel trailers for first time owners". But for years, DDG was doing cool things with the results page while Google was just a list of pages with ads, videos or news featured prominently at the top.
It took maybe a month to feel like I was searching effectively after switching, but I never found ddg's results to be appreciably less relevant at that point.
On the upside, since ddg is less popular than google, people have put less effort into getting crap pages higher in the search results, though I'll concede it's gotten worse over the last couple of years.
For me, the bangs are the killer app, combined with searching from the browser bar: I don't have to wait for e.g. google maps to load to do a maps search if I search !m pizza in Poughkeepsie.
Recently set up a Pi-hole to shield me from the rest. What else am I missing? Oh, YouTube! Drat. I’m a sucker for hobby videos on there. I’ve seen a couple of alternative front ends but nothing that has really stuck so far.
The major sticking point remaining is a shared library. I have my photos. My wife has hers. How do we manage photos of our children without duplicating?