The privacy aspects are not that important to me, I just want to get out of Google's increasingly irrelevant search results. I tried switching to DDG a couple years ago and it was a pretty meh experience, so I went back to Google.

But, I tried again just a couple months ago (I went whole hog and changed the search engine in chrome to ddg) and have been very impressed with it. It's been continuously worked on enough that it now serves about 90-95% of my daily search needs without any fuss and I actually prefer the way it presents images, semantic search and videos in search results over google's. It does a much better job at returning results for what I'm actually searching for and that's awesome.

For example in Google, if I search for "Mad Max" I get showtimes for "Mad Max: Fury Road" at the top and and imdb-like bit of information for "Mad Max: Fury Road" on the right (neither of which I searched for) and then a list of search results which these days are increasingly just links to Wikipedia's take on whatever I'm searching for (this time for "Mad Max" and "Mad Max (franchise)") followed by news on "Fury Road" the "Fury Road" video game, IMDB links to "Mad Max (1979)" and "Mad Max:Fury Road (2015)", etc. then trailers on youtube for both movies and links to the movie sites etc.

It's okay, I suppose, but Google first assumes I'm looking for "Mad Max:Fury Road" and fills the results for that, then I get links to WP and IMDB on the same topic (I could have just gone to those), except for WP it's not for Fury Road. And why no love for Thunderdome?

Guess what happens when I search ddg? I get a list of possible meanings, the first of which is "Mad Max" not Fury Road (that's #2), then a list of other possible meaning (which include Fury Road, the videogame, the Franchise, etc.). This is awesome, it's not assuming which meaning I want, and thereby getting it wrong like Google and the list of possible meanings is better ordered. Then the search results are better too, of course the prerequisite IMDB and WP links are there, but the top 4 results are for "Mad Max" (or the franchise) and not for "Fury Road"...I'm actually getting results for what I searched for, not for what it thinks I searched for. The mix of results after that is also "better" to my eyes, it includes a large fan site, which Google doesn't ever seem to get around to, Amazon, ebay, games, non-WP fan wikis, reviews, and so on.

Google seems intent on shoving the latest thing that the film studio marketing departments are currently pushing, while DDG provide links to information on what I actually searched for.

I've found this to be true for most of my searches. DDG is actually finding what I want instead of what Google wants.

About the only times I'm finding I'm using Google any more is in two cases:

* I've exhausted DDG's results and want to see if Google's bigger index has something else.

* Google's more sophisticated time constraints on searches. DDG just lets me order results, but Google let's me slice out results between time ranges, which I often find more useful for research purposes.

Bonus: Privacy, again not my main interest, but it's nice that it's there. !Bang syntax. I don't use many of them, but I find them useful (it's also how I execute google searches, just put a !g before my search in ddg).

Wishes: time-slice for search, someway to make it my default in mobile chrome on my android devices