[newscracker]

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 DDG has outdated or poor results and still does not support search by date (this is something I use heavily).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.