I found myself increasingly doing this to the point where I just gave up and submitted myself to Google once more. It’s still king.

That adds more time since the query is sent to DDG and then bounces the browser to Google. For searches where one prefers Google, using it directly (which is easier in Firefox for me) is a better option.

The latency is fairly negligible, to me at least. Plus if you're already searching in DDG it's faster to input !g than to go to Google. Also I think it's nice to give them that info where they could be done better.

What’s even the point of using !g to go to google it just redirects me last I checked so it’s still giving you your personalized searches (thus not a solution for privacy.) Am I missing something here?

I think it lets DDG know you weren't satisfied with the results for a particular query.

Do you really notice the extra milliseconds?

I wonder if they log those searches. To be clear: in a privacy-friendly way. It would be a treasure trove to them as they basically get statistics on which searches do bad on their engine. Focus on the most '!g'd search term, and then just work down the list.

"""We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."""

- https://duckduckgo.com/privacy#s4