I haven't used DuckDuckGo in years. Has it improved?

It happens to me 5% of the time : if the results are not what you expect, you can still ask DuckDuckGo to use google, just add !g to your search (or !gm for Google Maps, or !yc for Hacker News etc.) So userful! More here : https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Yes. This makes ddg useful as a default search engine even if you decide that you always want to use Google Search, because that you can use all the other bangs. Being able to search "on the fly" wikipedia, youtube, google maps etc. is very valuable

That's awesome, there's even ones for documentation (!cpp)

I find that it still falls down with a lot of programming questions, but in those cases I can always punt out to google. Aside from that, I think it works plenty well.

It's not good with loosely formulated queries. But if you have a good selection of words to use, it's better than Google.

Yeah surprisingly a lot in the last year.

I use it as a primary search engine on all devices. Every now and then I'd fallback to !g or !gi if a particular search is particularly bad, typically to learn that Google isn't much better. But the fact those commands are there makes it super low friction :)

Is anyone still using StartPage? Haven't seen it mentioned but it's been a great alternative for me. I use DDG on my iphone since safari won't let you set StartPage as the default.