However, once you start querying very specific things, it tends to fall apart. Just today I wanted to see if the a particular company utilizes any Machine Learning and searched for company-name machine learning. No top hit contained all three keywords or anything related to AI. On Google the top hit was a company research institute and contained all 3 keywords.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tiger
Recommendations: animals, military, people, movies, bands, organizations, technology, ... with a pretty picture, a subtitle, and a short description.
Top results: Wikipedia, Tiger Direct (a shop), WWF, Defenders of Wildlife, Tiger Woods, Detroit Tigers (baseball), ... (infinite list.)
https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=tiger
Single recommendation: Tiger (Animal), with a pretty picture, the life expectancy and the scientific name.
Top results: Tiger Airways, Wikipedia, Tiger Stores (a shop), WWF, Tiger Direct (another shop), Defender of Wildlife, ...
Special results "in the News": Tiger Airways, Tiger Woods.
I've been happily using DDG for almost a year now, but I still use `!g` regularly because it does get confused sometimes (point is: no search engine is perfect, but DDG makes it easy to redirect your search elsewhere.) I switched because google was pushing g+ too hard, experimenting with the presentation, customizing the result list based on my profile, and it was breaking my flow (like the popup "make google your default search engine", I get why they do it, but it required unwanted attention.) Somehow DDG convinced me that they would be less invasive.
But it does have a much nicer UI, and there are lots of searches that it does about as well as Google. For programming stuff, the !bang searches are nice (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html) -- I can type "!mdn createElement" or "!php obscure_function" and get straight to the official docs.
For broader topics, DDG's Wikipedia preview is a nice feature, the row of embedded images across the top for famous people is handy, and for everything else, I find the search results to be more readable than Google's.
