The Real Name policy was the beginning of the end for me, Reader being shut down made me lose interest in all new Google products, and Snowden made me stop using some of the ones I already had been.
The Real Name policy is noteworthy from starting out being fundamentally stupid at the "anyone who has spent a week online should know this" level, but still seemingly just a dumb mistake, to being downright malicious and evil the moment it was clear they had no intention of backtracking even after their attention had been brought to the risks it put some people in.
I've been using G+ consistently for a week now after signing off from a competing social network. I thoroughly enjoy it so far. Why is G+ dead in the water?
I think most people feel Google's incessant need to push it on every product leads to overexposure and this hate of G+. To further that, I closed my G+ account a few months ago due to inactivity. You'd better believe that the whole process made it sound like I was going to lose access to my email, my youtube account, etc. It wasn't a positive experience.
They dropped the ball on nearly every major integration in some spectacular fashion, essentially. Be it forced integration, loosing anonymity, or botching up the g-talk's chat history.
The chat history bit me. They used to have a really nice chat history that integrated into the email seamlessly and had good export options. It even worked through IMAP. Unfortunately that all disappeared when they made g-talk hangouts. Essentially it was a duct-tape job like mentioned above. Apparently their storage back-end is quite different and they didn't put the work in to allow for easy retrieval and review of full chat histories. Unfortunately I needed a mass of chat histories(a year) for Visa purposes and the switch was about two thirds in. Retrieving the newer stuff became a part time job :|
Other than that I kinda like G+. I also like real identity movement. Eventually I believe that will be a big differentiator for swaths of the internet. The civil, real name sites. And the seedy, anonymous underbelly.
If I had this product implanted in me and it was known for a substantial amount of time that said product was 0dayed, you better believe I have a right to know.
I've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions.
Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default search engine. If the result isn't great, I may rerun it with !g which will then forward my request on to google. Makes it really easy to migrated while still being able to fall back when needed.
For technical questions, my first go-to is generally StackExchange (!so) or a site-specific search (w3.org is great for specific CSS spec queries which I seem to have been doing a lot lately) via DDG bang syntax. Google's my third choice.
I agree with this. For programming issues I normally use !g to search Google. I suspect Google is better for programming queries because they did a lot of indexing of newsgroups, blogs, and StackOverflow. But for everyday queries, DDG works fine (and I prefer it to Google as I don't usually want to see Google Reviews/Maps/Plus links in the top 50% of the screen area... and I don't need to see results for alternate queries on the bottom 50%).
Meaning, if I just need to RTFM, DDG finds it for me. If I search for "Pymongo find function" it will return the documentation I want. If I'm having a problem or debugging something not explained in the manual, there's a slight chance I'll have to use !g and use Google. If I search for "Pymongo find function not returning all results while sorting" I might need Google.
The number of searches where I've had to use Google has decreased significantly in the last year.
I'm in about the same boat as mey. It's my default search engine, and I rarely fall back to google.
On the occasion when I do see oddball results, I report them and it gets straightened out promptly. (It's kind of awesome to be able to report a spam site, get a human response, and have the site removed within a day or two. I'm sure it won't be that way forever, but their results also keep getting better and better.)
Yes, what dredmorbius said. There's also https://duckduckgo.com/feedback which lets you report/request all kinds of stuff. (It's listed as "Feedback" in the menu at the top-right of the results page.)
Initially it was just "send Gabriel an email", which he still graciously responds to, but I've been trying to do things the "right" way more recently because I'm sure he gets a lot of email :)
I've been using it exclusively as my primary search for a year now, and it's as good as or better than Google for nearly all purposes.
You can re-run any search on google with the "!g" bang notation (or "!sp" for a proxied StartPage search, which is nearly the same).
The recent UI changes have been nice (my biggest observation was that my local CSS changes no longer actually change anything about the site, which is to say, my annoyances have all been addressed).
The primary lacking features are date-bounded search (I still use Google for this), and certain specialized searches (e.g., Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News), though DDG have been expanding their tools, and I'm increasingly using site-specific searches (e.g., reddit, HN, StackExchange, and certain blogs) rather than general Web searches.
It's my default search engine... but I find myself going to Google for about 75% of searches -- at least for my searches, they just aren't good enough yet.
Basically one of either outcomes happen:
1. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and one project gets renamed. Users are happy. Packagers are happy.
2. Maintainers of both projects fight it out and neither compromise. Users of both projects (intersection of the sets, rather than union) are pissed. Packagers are even more pissed, and put in an annoying and difficult situation, and forced to come out with weird hacky solutions to appease users. (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=614907)
To any of you who read this and find yourself naming a project in the future, do your users some justice and at least do some cursory Googling before settling on a name. And please don't pick annoying-to-Google names like + or * or - or _ or some other one- or two-character name.
