I use DDG as my default search engine, and find that the results are usually pretty decent. But there's no question that Google has a larger and more comprehensive index, especially for more obscure "long tail" queries. So I still fall back to a Google search (it's easy -- just add '!g' to your DDG query and resubmit) about 10% of the time.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if I wasn't able (or willing) to use Google.

I didn't know about !g. I'm using Firefox with the old style separated URL and search fields. I click the search field and the Google button on the menu that opens under the search string. However !g is useful when I tweak ed the search string in the DDG page.

Yandex is a much, much better search engine than DDG. The only irritating part about it that since it is Russian, it often shows many Russian sites in the top results. The best part about Yandex is that it also conveniently allows you to also search on Google or Bing if you don't find their result satisfactory. This allows them improve their search while also not upsetting their users.

If the goal of abandoning Google is about privacy, surely picking Yandex is counter-productive? Unless you make the conscious choice of having one entity keep the information from the rest, which I agree can make a lot of sense.

Realistically I don't expect any benevolence from any of the corporates that run all the popular search engines. (Even DDG is a private company with millions of dollars invested in it).

So my choice, as you rightly guessed, is limited to compartmentalising data collection, I also wanted to choose the best non-US competitor of Google - Yandex (Russian), Baidu (Chinese) and (later) Qwant (European). Yandex is the best among them.

To further compartmentalise data collection, I don't use Yandex exclusively and sometimes go directly to specialised sites for the answer. (For e.g. Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV and movies, Wikipedia for some queries, etc. ... this is now easy since browsers allow us to add custom search engines to them.)

> sometimes I feel like I don't see the results I expect to find

This gets brought up often but I wonder how much of that is just familiarity. Have you ever tried a different search engine if Google doesn't give you what you expected, or continued to either tweak the query or look further on Google anyway?

You could have a point. I tweak the query. Maybe after 20+ years I speak a query dialect optimized for Google.

but the !g does make it easy to get Google results when needed.

Which would be unavailable if Google didn't provide search in your area.