It's been my default search engine for years now and it seems to be fine for me, even with highly-technical searches. I'm resorting to !g less and less, and most of the time I don't get better results from that, either.
I have found google to be aggravating enough these days that I've experimentally switched my default search engine to Yahoo. It feels a lot like the old (good) google, though only having 5 results per page is a bit disappointing. So far so good, will probably stick to it for a while.
I've moved to using it as my default search provider. I'm using it well over half the time and if the results aren't great I add !g to the end to get google's results.
Not as good as google, but it still makes sense to make it (or something else) your default search engine for those 99% of times it actually works just fine.
How many of you are using it as your default search engine? I am. I don't think it's as good as Google, but I think it's good enough, some things are useful, like the quick links, and at least the user interface is cleaner, there is no stupid auto-complete etc.
After the obligatory vanity search yielded positive results (this rarely happens because I'm a nobody), I'm giving it a one week trial as my default search engine.
[Edit]
It seems to be giving way better results than Bing. Nice to see that smart dudes in garages can still give megacorps a run for their money in their own backyards.
It's my default search engine... but I find myself going to Google for about 75% of searches -- at least for my searches, they just aren't good enough yet.
I've switched over to it for 90% of requests. The only thing I find really fails are very precise technical questions.
Edit: Let me rephrase, it's my default search engine. If the result isn't great, I may rerun it with !g which will then forward my request on to google. Makes it really easy to migrated while still being able to fall back when needed.
It really is as good as google for most things, in my experience. I use it by default and when it can't find what I'm looking for, Google usually doesn't do much better.
I've been using it exclusively as my primary search for a year now, and it's as good as or better than Google for nearly all purposes.
You can re-run any search on google with the "!g" bang notation (or "!sp" for a proxied StartPage search, which is nearly the same).
The recent UI changes have been nice (my biggest observation was that my local CSS changes no longer actually change anything about the site, which is to say, my annoyances have all been addressed).
The primary lacking features are date-bounded search (I still use Google for this), and certain specialized searches (e.g., Google Books, Google Scholar, Google News), though DDG have been expanding their tools, and I'm increasingly using site-specific searches (e.g., reddit, HN, StackExchange, and certain blogs) rather than general Web searches.
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