I've been using DDG as my primary search engine since June, 2013. That's not my first attempt to make a go of it, I took a couple of stabs at DDG over the past year or two, but found that the results were less than satisfactory: slow response, <i>no</i> response, and often, poor matches on queries.<p>With the Snowden revelations and the abundantly clear trend of Google to aggregate as much personally-identifiable information as possible, I made a clean break in June, 2013. The performance and search quality are <i>vastly</i> improved. And while I don't eschew <i>all</i> Google products (though I'm making drastically less use of them, and as little as possible while authenticated), I find that using DDG as my first cut generally works.<p>For fallback, my usual scheme is DDG, !SP (StartPage, another proxying search aggregator making more full use of Google), and if I'm still not fully satisfied, Google itself.<p>There <i>are</i> areas in which Google's search tools are still hugely superior:<p>⚫ Searching within a date range. DDG doesn't offer this option.<p>⚫ Some specialized search, in particular Google Books and Google Scholar. Where Google focuses on its core competency of providing <i>search</i> and not on grabbing as much user data as possible, I find the company far more acceptable.<p>⚫ Some deep-site searches. Google seems to crawl sites more deeply and in more detail than DDG. I particularly rely on it for Reddit, whose own site search excludes comments.<p>As I've noted, Google's biggest liability is that, no matter its best intentions, it cannot provide any guarantee against a government-size advanced persistent threat, especially not one with the law (constitutional or otherwise) at its disposal: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_my_biggest_mistake_is_still_not_realizing/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1u356d/schmidt_...</a><p>But overall, I'm hugely impressed with DDG.<p>For those who use console / terminal browsers such as w3m or links, the 'lite' version puts the "search" button one tab following the search dialog: <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/lite" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/lite</a><p>And DDG's TTY mode (command-line interface) is teh awesomenessedness:<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/tty/" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/tty/</a>