I try DDG every once in a while for a couple of weeks since I'd like to switch. Yet even today, the results just aren't good enough. Particularly when debugging and searching development related error message I had to use the "!g" bang almost constantly.

For easy queries, DDG is great, but so is Google. When we reach just mildly confusing queries, the differences are very noticeable. One example from the top of my head: Searching for "devise", a popular ruby gem, yields several unrelated results before the actual Gem on DDG, while Google has the Github page as first result. Due to the popularity of devise I wouldn't rate this as a difficult query, yet problems already emerge on DDG. Multiply that by the number of queries you input daily and it becomes annoying.

Maybe because google have spent years compiling data about me, but I had to switch to google search yesterday to get a result that wasn't showing on DDG.

I have ddg as my start page on my main computer at home, I was looking for a military paint code so typed "military paint code A6" and all I got was Audi A6 sites (non military and I wan't looking for anything to do with Audi). Scoot over to google and my expected results where at the top.

I continue to use dgg because they won't improve otherwise. Google need the competition, frankly.

For things in English, I would say it's acceptable but relevance is still below google and I find myself switching to google for about 10% of my searches, being unhappy with what DDG got me.

For things not in English, it's quite bad.

I use DDG as my primary search engine, but I almost never perform a search without using a bang pattern.

Is there absolutely no chance that even 90's era Lycos could ruin this search? Use the blank ! and skip the list.

Do I need a brief overview before I do more refined research? Use !wiki

Do I have a bug in my code? Use !so

Did Stack Overflow have nothing about my bug? Use !scholar

For any other search, I just wind up putting in !g and letting Google handle it because, if I haven't found it by this point, the regular DDG search probably isn't going to help.

On average worse than Google but not without its pleasures. Much worse on "long tail" searches and non-English terms. I went back to Google.

To be fair what really made me move away was that their page load times were much slower. Now that I live in a country that is closer to DDG's servers I may give them another go.

I use it as my primary search engine and I'm mostly satisfied with it, but there are still times (once a day maybe) when I have to use Google (through Startpage).

I have been trying it as default se for a while and had to turn back to google recently.

It seems to be decent at first but after a while, I get the feeling that I'm not finding good matches that comes with google and loosing precious time on searches instead of studying the resulting pages.

A major annoyance are the endless clones of SO sites polluting my searches.

I switched to using DDG as a default a long time ago and have experienced improved results over the last few years. I would say that ~97.5% of my searches now go over DDG, if the search fail I add "!g" to the query to see if Google can do better. About 40% of my searches are research related, 40% software development related, and 20% "others". Searches that tend to fail are usually for local news in my country of origin or very exotic configuration/library errors. For the former, Google still does better than DDG, for the latter, it is about 50/50 if Google will fail to deliver as well.

I try to use DDG every once in a while, because I really would like to use them. But after a while, I almost always switch back and vow to try them again in a few months.

If you compare a query like "static webserver", you'll see why Google's results are much more diverse, than DDG's:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=static+webserver

https://www.google.com/search?q=static+webserver

Aligned with others here. English is okish, Estonian (my native) is bad. Not unusably bad, but bad. But !g is always there, so im fully switched and never going back.

Pretty okay for most stuff that has to do with work, never mind that often you can "bang" to where you really want to go anyway (github, wikipedia).

I often bang to google for longer queries or almost anything that's local to Germany.

Whilst the search results are generally quite good, Google is often far better for highly specific or technical queries. Google also shows genuine intelligence and understanding at times whereas I find that DuckDuckGo does not.

One big problem I find with DuckDuckGo is the search suggestions. I found that with DDG they are very poor and that I used them with Google far more often than I thought.

That said - give DDG a go! I think that for many people, the results are more than good enough. They have improved dramatically over the past few years. Even if you're not ready to use them full-time, I'd recommend trying them out on your phone first, perhaps.

I switched years ago, initially quality for non-US-centric results was lackluster, but it is excellent now. Considering that I'm stubbornly trying to use Tor wherever possible, the fact that it isn't blocked or hampered (like Google does with its crappy twisty little maze of captchas sometimes), is an additional advantage. I honestly cannot remember when I last felt I had to use "!g" and was proven right by better results. Perhaps Google Image Search is still worthwhile.

I use it as a default search engine and I'm very satisfied. The keyboard shortcuts are very handy [0]. I rarely find myself needing a different search engine. Only the images search is not really useful I think (also UI wise).

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=duckduckgo+shortcuts&t=canonical&i...

I'd say about 75% of the time it gives me what I'm looking for. The other 25% I end up using !ge or typically !so since what I'm looking for is webdev related and Stack Overflow usually has what I need. The !bangs more than make up for any lower quality in search results, imo

I use DDG as an addition to Google, not as a replacement.

When I want to look up something factual I know nothing about, DDG is the right searchengine. I finde that DDG is best at giving short, concise results.

When I'm searching for something within the (very) broad "entertainment" category, I go with Google.

They're getting better, or I'm getting use to using DDG and adjust my searches accordingly.

Without having much proof I would claim that DuckDuckGo is get better at about the same rate I feel Google as been declining in quality.

A styling UX complaint I have is the titles of the search results are the same colour as the excerpts so it's not easy to quickly scan the results. Google puts them in blue to differentiate all that text.

Pretty mixed. A search for my project (MikeOS) brings up a highlighted Wikipedia page at the top, even though that page was deleted over a year ago...

Works great for every day stuff.

If I'm searching something code-specific sometimes I might need to defer to searching elsewhere however.

Overall I would highly recommend DDG.