Every month or two, I run into a query where I don't find anything useful via DDG and expected to, so I try it again with !g...and end up confirming that Google doesn't give me anything useful either. It's been years since I last found a search where Google gave me more useful results.

I'd love to know what those 70% of your queries look like.

(One interesting observation: when first switching, I found that I liked the DDG results a lot better when I styled them to look like Google results; they felt more "right" somehow.)

For me, there are some queries that Google usually gives me better results. I couldn't tell you exactly what (mostly obscure code snippets, I think), and they're a relative minority, but sometimes I do use !g. It's not that often, though, and I'm a happy DDG user on all my computers.

I double-search less than 10% of my queries. I’ve been using ddg for the last four years. I think people that have to double search very often have been trained by google to use queries that aren’t supported by ddg.

Google proper has several value-adds besides the search results. Solving math equations put in the search bar for example. I usually use a dedicated service for things like converting feet to meters instead of typing it into google.

I too developed this habit. Then I forced myself to stop and realized that DDG actually was working fine for the great majority of my queries. I almost wish the bang wasn't there, because it makes it so easy to second guess DDG's results and develop the habit of always using !g when in reality DDG is actually quite good at this point.

I had the same. Tried qwant.com and now I have it once every 50 searches.