This makes me think. Why not add a Google Science or Google Dev with those features removed. Basically Google Scholar but also showing stackoverflow, blogs and GitHub code/gists?
Also Google without country redirection, my pet peeve. I can't use Google in private browsing mode any more since it insists redirecting to German results (yes, I'm currently physically in Germany), so I've started using DDG too.
I used this as default before I switched to DuckDuckGo completely. For a software developer google.de results are pretty useless. Switching the language to English helps a bit, but ncr results are a lot better for software and tech topics.
Also, if you want to break out of your own bubble and get non-personalized results, Google is pretty useless, because of the annoying data protection pop up.
Pretty much the only times I use Goggle is for local search , otherwise I’m pretty happy with ddg.
I believe ncr doesn't really work for this purpose anymore as searching on google.com will give you results for the country you're in without redirecting you to a different TLD.
Preferences works in regular mode, but I've noticed I mostly browse in private mode these days. Opening a private browser window has just become a habit I suppose, and probably not a bad habit either.
I do use NCR to switch to regular results in normal browsing mode where the selection sticks, but I don't know how to do that for the Firefox search box in private browsing.
In my experience Google is usually giving more relevant results to software development related searches, so I would like to retain that at least as an option.