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I switched to DDG mostly, and nowadays its results are great for most cases. Imo Google is a habit to break.

I switched to DDG a while back when I jumped out of chrome when was threatening adblockers, but I'm not always satisfied with the search results:

it's great if I know what I want to search (i.e. I know the field and the keywords and I need the specifics) but when I don't know what I want to search I can't use it for discovery (i.e. when learning new things and I lack the terminology)

The problem with DDG is that it doesn't do really well for non-English results. I use DDG now, but sometimes I do have to use !g to redirect to Google.

The bangs are one of the main draws of DDG for me. Besides not being google.

DDG. Come looking for anonymity, stay for the bangs.

I used https://lite.duckduckgo.com for a long time because of its near instant redirects, but it recently broke Firefox's omnisearch, and so I've all but stopped using it for even that.

The bangs are painfully slow over the main duckduckgo site.

Miss the bangs.

Being made by the French, Qwant.com seems to give better non-English results than DuckDuckGo and gives similar priority to privacy.

Qwant has a reputation on r/france for being completely awful. Not sure how justified that reputation is.

Also, for non-trivial results, Qwant is mostly a fancy Bing front-end, so you might as well use Bing.

I have been using DDG a little more frequently recently, however, it's image search was useless whenever I tried it.

Funnily enough, my experience is that the best image search engine is Yandex's. E.g. searching for a page from a comic with Google just gives me random comics, but Yandex's will more often find that exact comic.

Also, Yandex has an reverse image search [0] that works for faces. It's a little creepy, but an interesting tool to find similar looking pictures of people.

[0] https://yandex.com/images/

Used DDG for two years. Now switched to Qwant. Much better and not US based.

Not a fan of Google, but Qwant is simply unusable.

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