> Unless you can provide some quantifiable metric to prove its “getting better” then it's delusion

This doesn't prove anything. Unless you can provide some metric to say it's not good, then it's delusion getting the better of you.

DuckDuckGo is good enough for everyday usage, for me. It has been this way for well over a year. I never use bangs.

Indeed, DDG usually gives better results for me because it second-guesses precise search terms less than Google, and because its instant answers from sites like StackOverflow are high quality.

The one place it's really currently lacking is in rejection of spam sites.

To me, it comes across like a skewed, disproportionately-negative cognitive distortion, of what I won't speculate because I won't armchair/keyboard psychoanalyze.

Back the fatalism FUD truck up from going off the cliff with baseless, whiny negativity...

DDG is so good that I use GOOG maybe once a year as a secondary search engine. And I started with GS since it had a comically-terrible interface in 2000. I switched because they went evil and DDG was more than good enough being privacy-focused. The !bang searches are a big innovation and timesaver that sealed the deal.

That's kind of how I feel about DDG but am concerned that they don't offer the privacy they promise since they aren't open source and are hosted on AWS. Feel free to try something I created....jivesearch.com. You can get all the !bangs they have.

I'd argue that bang searches are enough of a feature that it's worth switching anyway, even if you end up falling back on Google.

I've been using DDG for ~4 years now. Haven't ever used a google bang and it never failed me.