I have been using DDG for the better part of the last year and it has improved considerably, especially with technical/dev stuff. Searching for error messages works much better now than even half a year ago which is probably a smart move by DDG to focus on technical people.

The biggest problem I have is when I try to search for non-American resources or when using a language other than English. German language search results are often simply horrible.

Despite that, I'm never reverting to google as my main engine, as the bangs simply provide too many benefits: I want wikipedia content? w! Search Google Scholar for a paper? scholar! A product on amazon? a! One less click than when using Google.

Though bangs have the same issues with other languages or non-American resources. w! brings you to the English wikipedia, a! to the American Amazon. Internationalization should be their next step.

Update: I'm actually mistaken about internationalization of bangs (see https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html for the full list) - !wde searches on the German wikipedia, !wpl on polish etc. Great stuff. Even better, I could suggest a new bang here: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang, so I'm sorry for spreading any misinformation.

Thanks, I didn't know about the localized bangs! When DDG falls short on an error message I usually resort to !ix (ixquick) and !sp (StartPage).

This is the first time I heard of DuckDuckGo. I am going to "try it for a week" on all my computers.

This might be just what I needed to start the much delayed escape from Google Search, GMail, and eventually Google Voice and Android. Chrome will probably be the hardest. That, though, I know is Chromium; maybe I can draw the line there.

Appreciated the comments that lead me to http://disconnect.me earlier today.

I'm almost completely disconnected now. DDG is fine (usually ok, sometimes worse and very occasionally better), and there's always !i or !g if you start misssing google. FastMail costs money but is in my opinion better than GMail. I have SIP instead of google voice, although it doesn't provide free transcription which I would like. I have cyanogenmod on my android phone without the google apps, although I do miss some of them (plus a lot of the app library that depends on google play services). I actually really like firefox these days and use nightly on both android and my desktop, they sync nicely. I have a plugin (google disconnect) that stops other sites from telling google servers about my visit (blocks a massive number). This also causes youtube embeds not to work, but you can always click the icon and say unblock for now.

I use owncloud on a 60$ per year vps server for syncing calendar and contacts, dropbox functionality, rss reader etc. It's slow and not as good as google drive, but it's good enough and I have more space and full control.

So for me it costs about 110$ per year to disconnect from google, and not all of the replacements are as good, but some are better, and I definitely feel better about it.

I've done the same, although I still use Google Search, and Gmail -- when I finally decide to switch email, I will switch to a self-hosted one, preferably.

OwnCloud is quite awesome as of version 6. If you're still running 5, I highly suggest updating. I love it as a platform for building web apps, too: done right, and you can get things like a Google Reader alternative embedded within, and hooked into DAV and the like for access across many different clients.

I love it :)

You use your own domain with fastmail. You can switch to it now, migrate all your gmail to it, set your gmail to forward to it, and if you later decide you hate it, you can switch to self-hosted by just changing your mx records.

Before I went to gmail I was self hosted and I had so much trouble with people not receiving my email because my server wasn't trusted, and me not receiving emails occasionally because my server would occasionally be down or busy. Not to mention the spam filtering was much better on gmail than my own server.

I just need an off-site email as a fail-over for if my own cloud services are interrupted. I will always want to have some kind of third-party email service for absolutely-must-receive messages, like alerts from the cloud service provider. I live in fear of the day that one of those alerts sent by the virtualhost provider is information about an outage going on at that moment.

OwnCloud looks cool as a Zimbra replacement possibly, for the personal storage aspect, while I finish coding my own stuff.

DDG has no filter bubble. That means I'm more likely to find something I haven't found before, which may provide a different way to solve my problem.

With google, I kept ending up on the same pages which gave no solution over and over again.

The dark side of personalization. I don't want to be stuck being who I am today.

DDG is like Google on the early days. When the founders gave interviews where they started with a blank page, the logo and the textbox, nothing more.

The page is simpler and with less cruft. There are minimal unobtrusive ads. There is a dark mode. These are other reasons other than privacy to choose DDG.

I would love to see an alternative to Google - and I am trying hard to give DDG a chance.

But: The quality of the search results just is not there (yet?). Thus I am mostly using the !g parameter prefix when starting a search.

Also, I am not how strong the impact on privacy is. If DDG would be a german company and I would have read the TAC, maybe I could sleep better..

I use DDG as my primary search interface, by which I mean I use DDG as the front end to various other search tools. The quality of results returned by DDG itself is quite a lot worse than Google in my experience, but DDG is still very handy.

penalizing sites with adsense and others. (like w3schools) may give DDG some advantage with technical audience.

I'm not sure what your point is. I'm not aware that DDG penalizes adsense. If you search for html xxx tag, you'll see that htmlquick.com generally comes first in the results, and it's full of adsense ads.

To be honest w3schools is much better than htmlquick, which is why google has it at the top of the search results.

For some reason w3schools isn't even in the first page of results of DDG, instead they have a whole bunch of crappy sites. Even MDN isn't there.

This is the first time I've used DDG in a few years, and it makes me want to stay with google.

What exactly is their algorithm? Whatever it is, I think they might need to tweak it a bit.

if you're going to use DDG for searching documentation only, Dash (OS X) or Zeal (Windows) is much better.