I've had a serious go at DDG 3 times now - last month I tried it but I ended up just using !g for every search and so went back to Google. The thing I use most often, and major frustration with Google, is limiting the search by time period : I wish the additional tools would be sticky.

I did blind search engine testing and Google came out on top.

That said Google is frustrating me more and more, especially now you need to "put it in quotes" if you don't want them to just show you things they think might be tangentially related in some way to your search and, you know, show you results with the actual terms in.

It's quite interesting to me that Google's main advantage when I first used it was I didn't need to AND all my terms together, it was the differentiating feature that won me over (I can't recall who from, it was around the time of Teoma and AllTheWeb IIRC). Now even when you use the cumbersome notation to say a term is required it still shows you pages without the term on ... but it nonetheless is the best offering I can find (for me). Argh!