Ha, you're the guy behind Pond (hi!). As a security researcher, how does it feel to work for a company that (reportedly) (pro)actively collaborates with the NSA? Are you ever worried that the company might not be as ethical as it seems to the average Googler?
puts on tinfoil hat
edit: Thank you for the downvote[s]!
edit2: I just remembered a relevant example. Reading "How Google works", I clicked in many ways with their vision about smart creatives and how to run a company properly. However I then immediately realised that it's written by the same a-hole involved in the massive Google-Apple wage fixing scandal [0], and it made me question how much of what's in there is real.
agl is one of a handful of people who are moving the needle on HTTPS usage, pretty much through sheer force of will. So of all the people you could pick on, you made a really lousy choice.
You'll get a "feel" for which queries are more suitably answered by Google than DDG quickly enough--which is not all that often as you expect, not because DDG's own results are so incredible, but because as you get the hang of the other !bang operators, you'll find you search directly the very sites that you wished/expected your top Google hits to be in the first place (!w Wikipedia, !so Stackoverflow, !r Reddit, !snopes, !gi !yi !bi image search engines, !map Google maps, !yt Youtube, !wnl !wde !wxx Wikipedia country-code xx, to just name a few I use all the time).
However, if you want an encrypted search option, https://encrypted.google.com/ is always encrypted and isn't affected by these methods.