The ducks are always greener
When Casey Liss posted about his switch to DuckDuckGo last month, I switched to it myself and didn’t tell anyone so I could give it an honest try. My principles are only diverging further from Google’s over time, and I feel a bit defeated whenever I turn to them for anything anymore, so I attacked my primary dependence head-on: web search.
In my experience so far, DuckDuckGo’s search is good enough the vast majority of the time. Sometimes, its results are even better than Google’s, and they’re rarely much worse.
The best thing they offer is the !g prefix to direct any given search to Google — but not because Google’s results are better. Being able to quickly try an unhelpful DuckDuckGo search on Google almost always returns equally unhelpful Google results, confirming that the results I got from DuckDuckGo are crappy because web search just sucks these days.
It’s an antidote to grass-is-always-greener syndrome: you immediately see the mediocrity you’re missing and stop doubting your choice.