[JohnStrange]

Yandex is pretty good but I haven't found a use case for DDG yet. Whenever I set it for "privacy" reasons (not that I really believe them), I have to go back to Google to get reasonable results. I can confirm the memory loss, though, ego-surfing confirms it for me. Much of my older stuff is gone and all the top links for my name are related to my current work. (So in my case, it's kind of beneficial.)

[tripzilch]

That's because you're not using DDG's !bang syntax to its full power. I have it as my default address bar search engine so I can redirect straight to Wikipedia (using !w), Discogs or whatever of the 1000s of !bang abbreviations are defined.

Just the amount of times where you know the most useful (and probably top) result on Google will be Wikipedia makes DDG worth it. Saves a click. But for me it saves a click very often.

If I need Google occasionally I just append !g, but it's just one of the many other places I use !bangs for finding stuff.

[detaro]

But browsers already have that functionality built in, why go through DDG for that? (well, Chrome and Firefox do, not sure about others)

[tripzilch]

If others = Opera, then yes, they came up with that first :)

I've been using those kinds of keyword search shortcuts for years before switching to DDG by default.

The realisation was that having 100s (maybe 1000s already) of easily-guessable search shortcuts pre-programmed with DDG's !bang syntax is way more useful than having top configure 10-20 of them by yourself (and forgetting most of them when you reinstall a browser). Definitely worth the extra "!" keystroke and redirect :) [especially given DDG doesn't track you via that redirect].