I find the results worse too, especially for technical stuff. DDG has outdated or poor results and still does not support search by date (this is something I use heavily). I do have DDG as my default search engine, but I often find repeating the same searches using Startpage. It will take a lot more work on DDG's part to have me use it without getting back to Startpage/Google.
The only times I resort to Google are for recent news searches, search by image and times when even Startpage does not provide adequate results (I don't understand why that happens since Startpage is a proxy for Google). The "site:" searches still seem to work better with Google.
Additionally, I also don't like the way the search result links in DDG get selected when using the arrow keys (similar to caret browsing mode) instead of scrolling the page. This becomes more of an annoyance when the mouse cursor is already somewhere on the screen and a search result gets highlighted unintentionally. I found this behavior can be changed by turning off the "Keyboard shortcuts" setting (under "General" settings), but I don't like saving search engine settings, and feel this default is not a good choice. Not sure if others find it extremely useful.
I switched today. I actually find the results to be better in my case. For example, I don't have to groan every time I search for something web related and get w3schools as the first result.
I'm seeing w3schools more often on DDG. :/ For example the query [css font-face] returns them as the #1 result on both DDG and Google. But Google at least has the Mozilla developer network as the #2 result, while DDG's #2 result is... another w3schools page. As are results #4 and #7. You have to go down to #11 to get the Mozilla result.
Overall I find DDG good enough most of the time, though. The main thing Google still seems to do better is heuristically figuring out vague queries or queries for not quite the right term, as well as word-sense disambiguation.
The only times I resort to Google are for recent news searches, search by image and times when even Startpage does not provide adequate results (I don't understand why that happens since Startpage is a proxy for Google). The "site:" searches still seem to work better with Google.
Additionally, I also don't like the way the search result links in DDG get selected when using the arrow keys (similar to caret browsing mode) instead of scrolling the page. This becomes more of an annoyance when the mouse cursor is already somewhere on the screen and a search result gets highlighted unintentionally. I found this behavior can be changed by turning off the "Keyboard shortcuts" setting (under "General" settings), but I don't like saving search engine settings, and feel this default is not a good choice. Not sure if others find it extremely useful.