I've been using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for almost three years.
It's improved fairly steadily in that time (as measured by how often I end up falling back to appending "!g" to my search), but this is the single biggest improvement I can remember in my time as a user.
Aside from the auto-complete (which is nice), it feels significantly faster, and it's also easier to parse visually.
My need for !g has certainly decreased, but I also find that when I do use it I often feel that the DuckDuckGo result was actually closer to what I wanted.
DuckDuckGo seems to be getting better, while Google is getting worse in some areas. The results that I get from Google is still impressive, but more and more it seems that they are making wrong assumptions about my wishes.
Is there anyway you know of to use DDG in the omnibar with some kind of autocomplete? That's the dealbreaker for me right now...I tried installing the chrome extension but it only lets you search in the omnibar by typing 'd'+space first, and still uses google's autocomplete (for "d [your search term], no less")
To clarify, this is not a DuckDuckGo product and having your autosuggestions come from Google means passing your searches to them as well.
The next version of DuckDuckGo was released today: https://duckduckgo.com/
and includes our own autosuggest (with !bang autosuggest as well--just type !) . You can get autosuggest in your browser's address bar with some of our browser addons like the Firefox one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duckduckgo-fo...
It's improved fairly steadily in that time (as measured by how often I end up falling back to appending "!g" to my search), but this is the single biggest improvement I can remember in my time as a user.
Aside from the auto-complete (which is nice), it feels significantly faster, and it's also easier to parse visually.
I'm really excited about seeing DuckDuckGo evolve, and it seems more and more people are as well: https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html