[crumblan]

I know, but I wanted Google, and I found it difficult to remove the branded search and switch to basic Google. It's not a ridiculous complaint, I just think if they are willing to treat their users like that it will only get worse in the future. I jumped off of Ubuntu because of Unity, though, so I might be feeling very "once bitten..."

[drostie]

That is quite understandable, but think of it from a scrupulous person's perspective. You could make your default search Google, in which case you're sending your user a mixed message: "I am giving you the popular search" versus "I don't actually care about your privacy."

What's worse is, it's generally a conflict of interest. At least at one point (and perhaps it's still the case) Google was paying Mozilla for the privilege of being the default search provided on Firefox. Don't get me wrong, I like money going towards Mozilla; but I'd prefer that Mozilla not have to sell Firefox users' privacy for it.

Google Search is still a bit better than DDG at very recent news, at exposing cached pages, and at calculating natural language expressions. Sometimes they are better on relevance but for most searches DDG does very well. In some sense the freshness of Google Search is its only real remaining advantage in the marketplace: the Internet Archive has long been better for long-term caching, and Wolfram Alpha now does a much better job with some natural language queries.

("Some" because astonishingly, Wolfram Alpha does not have a syntax of composition. What I mean is, you can just ask Wolfram Alpha "Schwarzschild radius of the Sun" and it will answer that if the Sun got beneath 6 km wide, it would collapse into a black hole. But don't try to append the words "in light-seconds" or "/ speed of light" to that query, don't even wrap it in parentheses, because Wolfram Alpha will suddenly look at you and say, "WTF does any of that mean?!?!?")

[Danieru]

Selling the default search position to Google is just about Mozilla's entire cash flow. It amounts to several hundred million a year.

[idleloops]

I bypass the search box. By adding a keyword search (inspired by Opera,) to my browser (Firefox.) Then when I want to search, I hit CTRL + L and then type something like 'dd search term' for say duck duck, then hit return. I can set up multiple keyword searches - which I find personally more flexible.

You loose suggest which is slightly annoying, but I can live with that.