I'm not even using Duck Duck Go. But that doesn't mean you need to use Gmail, Google Maps, Android, etc etc.

After moving to Germany I met quite a few non-tech people who ditched Google for DDG: artists, musicians, accountants, translators.

You can still fallback to Google from the DDG UI

I don't work in tech or do any programming and I use ddg.

Why not? There is zero difference between it's interface and that of Google search.

Because of the search results.

Google search results have been deteriorating in the past couple of years. It feels like the algorithm has been deliberately tweaked to produce larger quantities of less relevant results - it will often substitute words for "synonyms" that are much broader in scope, to the point of rendering the query pointless. I can't help but think that the purpose is to then show more "relevant" ads.

Even so, the deteriorated results I get from Google tend to be better than what I get anywhere else. I have DDG set as my default engine, and frequently need to fallback on Google.

I wish I could say DDG was as good or better, but outside of the privacy perspective, that unfortunately hasn't been my experience.

Unfortunately, there's no way DDG could compete with Google without any tracking/history as google has.

Once I had great Google Fu. I could find really niche topics. Currently, it's completely useless for that. If it's not something that many people want to find, you cant find it.

You can still pull it off, but it requires copious quoting to ensure no substitutions or removals from the query.

Reevaluating this statement yearly is a good practice for an enlightenment.