I originally started switching my default browser search results to DuckDuckGo about 18 months ago due to privacy concerns and not wanting to support Google.
A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing.
The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches.
I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.
A strange side-effect I noticed over this period was being able to find things _much quicker_ than my colleagues. I thought maybe I was just better at picking what words to type in - but after we did some comparisons, DDG really does just provide better results now (and increasingly so) for the kinds of searches we're doing.
The bangs are useful, but honestly I haven't really needed to use them. Occasionally I'll use a !g or !yt, but this is maybe 1% or less of my searches.
I've even taken the rare step of disabling uBlock and some other Firefox extensions because I _want_ DDG to succeed.