I set my default search to DDG and I find myself using G! in my queries a lot more than I want to.

I'm genuinely curious about the examples where you didn't find the result on ddg and found via !g

I've noticed that if I don't find something on ddg and go to google I usually don't find what I'm looking for there either.

Have the same, really want to like ddg for over a year but I almost hit !g every time

In practice ddg is great for everything except searching for programming related things. I guess Google knows I'm a programmer and filters my results accordingly. Sadly about 60% of my searches are programming-related.

Programmer here. I've been using DDG for about 2 years and only find myself desperately going to google about once per month. And that's usually for image search. Google's results now seem to me too "commercial" as if all the spots were just sold, offering me something they want to sell, not what I want to search.

DDG is great for me for almost everything (including programming) besides very long tail results, specifically rare error messages.

I use ddg exclusively on all my devices for over three years now and can‘t complain. I had no reason to switch to g! for any topic I needed results. So I wonder if I would solve issues in programming faster or not using google. I never had the feeling my programming related searches are not spot on.

What does that do?

It’s called a “bang command”, [1] and DDG redirects that search to another site. You can set DDG as your default search engine but rely on these commands to search on other sites. Just put the bang command anywhere in your search term or phrase.

In this case, “!g” means search on google.com. So you get redirected to Google for that search. You can search on Startpage with !s, Wikipedia with !w, IMDB with !imdb, Amazon with !a, Google Images with !gi and so on. There are thousands of bang commands.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Redirects you to a Google search (try it here: https://duck.com?q=!g%20test)

A google search

with less bubble/tracking I think. but I only !g a few times a year so not an expert on it

Why would there be less tracking? It's a regular google search, accessed directly from within your browser window.

Ironically, your website doesn't actually allow me to use it.