I have used it as a default for at least 2 years. I'd estimate drop back to Google for 20-25% of specific "subject matter" searches, mostly around technology. Probably a bit less than that for general searches.
Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often.
DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain. Any Amazon links are always to .com and not the regional site. Just a general understanding of region specific results seems to be missing, and I end up qualifying searches with the country or town.
DDG skews very heavily towards your country setting indeed, and the default is indeed the USA, but Google is even worse. On DDG the locale selector is a switch displayed on every search results page. For Google, you have to use a VPN for the same effect.
I'm a Dutchman living in Germany speaking English at home and at work, so I switch between languages quite a lot: Dutch when I want to know local things (e.g. European laws, or recipes with ingredients that stores here actually carry), German when I need to know something like filing taxes or when trash is being picked up (I don't speak German yet, so I only do this when necessary), and English for everything else. Trying to do that on Google is nearly impossible. It somewhat picks up on the language of your query (certainly better than DDG picks up on that), but for English queries I'll still get a few German results, even after I click the "Change to English?" prompt (and I have to click every time, since I do not store cookies for Google). Like, thanks for this German forum thread when looking for an error message after I already set it to English... In DDG you can just flip a switch.
This. At least DDG gives you the option (prominently) to quickly and easily "nationalise" a query, if you want to, and doesn't try to impose its guess on you.
I've often found it annoyingly hard to get Google products back to a language I understand while traveling (no, the "append `&hl=en` to the URL" trick doesn't always work...)
I switched to DDG about half a year ago.
What I really like is that for me I can switch location bias on and off.
Sometimes I want region specific results, but most of the time not, so I actually get better results on DDG.
The problem with falling back only 20% to 25% of the time is that you don't know what you've missed. By going to Google you already realize it is a better engine. What is the tangible gain of this self-sabotaging ?
Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.
As for the "something else" gain, my concern with this is that it is only claimed, not observed. You don't know what DDG does with your data, you have their word for it. You might think that they don't use your data because you don't see personalized results, but what people forget is that DDG is not a search engine in itself but rather a wrapper around other search engines: Bing, and the Russian search engine Yandex. At least Bing does not provide personalized search results as-a-service.
> Yes it is, if <insert your favorite expensive car here> is the same price as your Hyundai (that is, free). If however you moved because you found Google's results to be inferior, then that is a perfectly valid reason.
In my case the price was higher and for a while the results were better.
> DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain.
DDG also skews heavily to US results which is one reason I find DDG useful.
I have been largely using DDG for years. What finally drove me away from Google completely is that you cannot get search results that are untainted by localization anymore. Whenever I search for programming related topics or the subjects typically discussed on HN I always get a some confusing local results no matter what language and region settings I use. https://google.com/ncr which did a good job for years doesn't seem to work anymore.
Really the only reason to refer to Google nowadays is if I deliberately search local places, organizations and businesses - this is where Google is unbeaten in my opinion. Even local news and events isn't usually worth the g! switch. These two might be good in the US but here in Germany all search engines are equally bad at it.
By a huge margin the most frequent time I drop back to Google is because they have unit conversions built in. So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.
It's basically replaced my TI-89 for years, I hate doing calculations with units by hand and it's super error prone to not include them in the calculations.
For everything else, duckduckgo has consistently provided a suitable result to answer my question for 90%+ of stuff, no worse than Google. It's super rare for me to check if Google has better results for normal things. I see them as a different ordering rather than superior ordering, so I think of Google more as an alternative than a fallback. They clearly both interpret whether a site is a good match using different algorithms but I don't know I'd say one is strictly superior.
But like you I drop back for unit-aware calculations. For those an alternative to Google is Wolfram Alpha “!wa speed of light / 400nm in terahertz” [3] which also allows for symbolic computation “!wa integral of 2x” [4].
> So I can send duckduckgo a query like "!g speed of light / 400nm in terahertz" and I get the calculated unit-correct answer immediately.
You can use the command-line program units(1) to do this, available on all Unices. (The preinstalled version on macOS is horribly outdated though, so you might have to look for a newer version in Homebrew.)
$ units --verbose
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-02-20
3070 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: c / 400 nm
You want: terahertz
c / 400 nm = 749.4811449999999695137376 terahertz
c / 400 nm = (1 / 0.001334256380792608193130988) terahertz
The only drawback is that getting up-to-date currency exchange rates requires running an extra program, units_cur.
Most of the time I run the same search on Google the results are very similar for the top hits. But Google does seem to produce helpful results that are not exactly what I searched for more often.
DDG also skews heavily to US results which is a pain. Any Amazon links are always to .com and not the regional site. Just a general understanding of region specific results seems to be missing, and I end up qualifying searches with the country or town.