I switched to DDG about 3 weeks ago, I'm having to !g quite a lot still and sometimes even switch back to non-encrypted google so they can take account of my past searches.

I can't believe you're not aware of the gulf between DDG searches and google ones, they are, to me at least, noticeably better.

OTOH, I've tried DDG before and this time I haven't switched back, it's now good enough that !g is enough for the 10% of times it fails. The loss in relevancy is now small enough for me to be happy to gleefully accept the gain in privacy.

I've realised that whenever a query is particularly complex, DDG is going to fail. I almost know which queries to !g even before typing them. Niche programming questions especially. For example, I've been doing a bunch of i18n for a client in .Net and anything past the most basic questions, the content available online for doing it well is surprisingly sparse, I guess it's something most .Net programmers don't have to deal with. Google has been providing much better links to complex questions. Also a few weeks ago I wrote a purposefully very lightweight widget without jquery and questions like "do X in javascript without jquery" or "do X in javascript with IE8 support", google seems to be much better at respecting the "without jquery" and "with IE8 support" bits of the query.

I also don't see the point of their other bangs. SO search, reddit search, etc. are so awful. Just so utterly terrible when you compare them to google that you wonder what the point of those bangs are.

Personally, I think their extension that shows the top SO result is more annoying than it is good, it almost always cuts off the actual code, you have to click once to see the rest of the answer anyway, generally speaking you get much more insight from the actual SO page as you see the other answers and I'd far prefer the SO result to be at the top to click than suddenly a huge, virtually pointless, chunk of text which cuts off half the actual code being at the top of the search results.

I also, quite guiltily, miss being able to search a film title and get the local listings or other location based searches, I know google are spying on my location, but damn is it much better on google. As someone who believes in privacy quite ardently, I feel I am actually keenly aware of the benefits you give up by not disclosing that information. I admit I only just found the DDG setting to set your country, but they really should make such an important setting much more visible rather than assuming everyone new is in the US, getting amazon.com results when you want amazon.co.uk results is very frustrating. Google automatically redirects you to google.co.uk with the option to switch back.

Google is also much better at mixing relevant video and image results with your search when appropriate (e.g you search a celeb's name or you search for something like "fallout 4 settlement management mod" google will show a mix of links, images and videos).

EDIT: though, again, I'm not finding myself switching back, I do urge anyone privacy conscious to give DDG another go for a few weeks, it really is very good now and you can prefix queries with "!g " if you want to google search instead.