While this is certainly an impressive feat, I've not found myself impressed with DuckDuckGo's results. I love the principles of having search results be free of personal information but, for a search provider that essentially collects and organizes other search engine's results, I always find myself back at Google. Often times the result I wanted was as many as 4 or 5 pages back, whereas with Google it's usually in the first 5 or so results, immediately seen on the first page.
Thank you for giving it a try! We're always trying to improve and to the extent you remember any specific examples we'd love to review them: http://duckduckgo.com/feedback.html
I prefer DDG for general search, but google was too good at digging up obscure code errors. I end up spending more time looking for errors than general stuff (which I guess means I'm a terrible programmer), so grudgingly switched back to the googs.
There's a different approach to DDG, which emphasises having a set of trusted sources rather than a powerful whole-web analysis as Google does. DDG often misses the wanted result, but often gives the result much higher up than Google.
I use Google more than I do DDG, but I use DDG enough that I miss the DDG shortcuts quite a bit when using Google: I recommend spending more time with DDG. The !hn shortcut, for instance, is quite useful around here.
There is a Chrome extension that allow DDG searches while keeping Google as your default:
I've switched to using DDG in FireFox for the past couple weeks. It works fine for 80% of searches and occasionally surprises me with the zero-click box, but the other 20% of the time I have to use Google.
If you can't find what you are looking for on DDG, just slap a !g on the query and you go straight to google. This slight inconvenience for some searches is outweighed by the power of !bangs and the zero click info.
