I didn't think I ever would, but I've actually been using duck duck go as my primary search engine. However, about 10-20% of searches I need to prepend "!g" to search google instead since DDG isn't fully there yet.
As far as I know, no, there isn't. I've tried going away from Google, but always failed.
The problem is that Google clearly care about search less and less each day. If the trend continues, we'll be able to change some day, but not because the other sites got better.
Tried it too. Wasn't that happy. I was also never a fan of different search options in my browser bar so the !bang feature wasn't really my thing either.
Now I'm contributing to OpenStreetMap, because I think at least that stands a chance against google maps and might even help some other search engines. DuckDuckGo is using it and maybe Bing will at one point, at least that would explain why they provide aerial images.
The only blind study[1] I've heard of on the subject put Bing ahead of Google at almost 2-to-1 (yes, seriously).
>> Conducted by California-based Answers Research, the study queried an online sample of nearly 1,000 people at least 18 years old, all living in the US. None of the participants in the survey knew Microsoft was involved. Participants performed 10 searches of their own choosing, and were shown the results from both Bing and Google, side by side, with all the the branding removed. Additionally, notes Microsoft, “The test did not include ads or content in other parts of the page such as Bing’s Snapshot and Social Search panes and Google’s Knowledge Graph.” For each search, participants chose which side showed better results, or could call it a tie. Of the participants surveyed, 57.4 percent chose Bing more often, 30.2 percent chose Google more often, and 12.4 percent didn’t prefer one over the other.
It was this study that inspired Microsoft's Bing it On campaign in 2012. Unfortunately, the ad campaign mostly consisted of Microsoft recreating the independent study, but cheating to make sure Bing would win even bigger[2].
For accuracy duckduckgo is leaps and bounds better than google search. But I think what most of the users want from a generic search engine is not accuracy but fuzziness, context and news awaresness.
For instance if I search ping pong in google right now, my first result is a currently airing japanese tv series about ping pong (and the show name is not even in the same alphabet I used to search). Duckduckgo returns the english wikipedia article.
Also, the title of this article is so messed up...
I get Wikipedia's Table Tennis entry first (I do use Wikipedia a lot). The first page includes 5 local/state related links, also has an "In-depth articles" section at the bottom with three items. The 2nd page is good as well, I personally can't complain, although I still rue the day they zapped the + operator.
One more personalisation data-point ... I get the Ping Pong Dim Sum restaurant chain as my top result when I google for ping pong! Not entirely unreasonable since I am in London where their restaurants are located and I do eat dim sum more often than I play table tennis ...
I've been using DDG for over a year solid, and for the past couple on and off.
I still run the occasionally !sp or !g bang search (StartPage is a proxied Google, the other hits Google directly). And in almost all cases there's little if any discernable difference.
The main exceptions are:
1. Date-bounded searches. DDG doesn't support this.
2. Special collections. Books and Scholar in particular.
Until recently, I'd have included images, but DDG's added that. Maps can be searched through OSM.
My primary concerns are privacy and search bubbling, but quality is up there as well.
