Privacy. DDG at least claims to make it a first-class feature, and one would imagine that means that they're not selling you out when they pass the search along to Bing. Going directly to Microsoft may be OK. I haven't really bothered to look into it; I just went with my warm fuzzies. This is a spot where Microsoft has a checkered past, and it's going to take a bit more than the ill-fated "Scroogled" ad campaign to change minds there.
Cleaner UI. Bing's interface is relatively cluttered compared to DDG's. It loads all sorts of images, sticks a chumbox on the bottom of the home page, nags you to download Edge, etc. If I run a search, I have to often scroll through two entire screen heights of I-don't-know-what before I get to actual webpages. Lately, DDG has been adding clutter to their site as well, but there's still quite a lot less of it, and what there is tends to be less visually noisy.
Microsoft's behavior starts to make a lot more sense if you think of it as a large conglomerate of smaller organizations, each with its own agenda, and its own ways of throwing its weight around.
For a while, you could get away with interpreting Apple's behavior as if it were a single person with a coherent mind. Since 2011, though, that model's been getting less and less workable for Apple as well.
Or more likely MS figured out they can make more money licensing Bing search to other search companies instead of trying to appeal directly to consumers.
Privacy. DDG at least claims to make it a first-class feature, and one would imagine that means that they're not selling you out when they pass the search along to Bing. Going directly to Microsoft may be OK. I haven't really bothered to look into it; I just went with my warm fuzzies. This is a spot where Microsoft has a checkered past, and it's going to take a bit more than the ill-fated "Scroogled" ad campaign to change minds there.
Cleaner UI. Bing's interface is relatively cluttered compared to DDG's. It loads all sorts of images, sticks a chumbox on the bottom of the home page, nags you to download Edge, etc. If I run a search, I have to often scroll through two entire screen heights of I-don't-know-what before I get to actual webpages. Lately, DDG has been adding clutter to their site as well, but there's still quite a lot less of it, and what there is tends to be less visually noisy.