Technical stuff research have no problem of secrecy... But I perhaps would use Duck to search my magic mushrooms... but... more efficient ?

As @arunyokesh pointed out, I too took some time to switch to DuckDuckGo because the results were so different from Google. But I pushed myself to do it, mainly for privacy reasons—and now I often find Google's results disorienting!

For code-related questions, StackOverflow or similar sites are usually among the top results. I've also learned to tailor my search queries to work on DuckDuckGo: I think the style is a bit different from Google, but I can't figure out what exactly it is.

There's a kind of logic which is a bit hard to explain, but DuckDuckGo thinks more like a computer and less like a human than Google does. I've seen people type in questions like "How do I verify an email using Python?" into Google. DuckDuckGo works better with a phrase like "python email regex". (Just an example: I don't know of it works for the exact phrases I mention). The bottom line is that, as a programmer, I find it pretty easy understand how DuckDuckGo "thinks".

For other (non-programming) topics, the fact that DuckDuckGo doesn't personalise results also made me discover a lot of new sites that I hadn't found earlier. I've read about—and noticed—the Internet Bubble (now also called Echo Chamber), that shows you only the kind of content you already read, which makes you miss out on other ideas and viewpoints. I think it's worth scrolling through few more results if it helps me discover new sites along the way. I have also made it a habit to scroll past the first or second page in case there's more interesting stuff buried in there that I missed.

And, as some have pointed out, if I really can't find my result, the Google is just a !g away. Though, nowadays, I hardly use even that.

I consistently use duckduckgo and love it. Sometime if I think that I will get a better result from google I will simply use a bang such as !google test which then makes a request to encrypted.google.com/search so your call is still encrypted.

Never even heard about it..

I used it for a little bit, but I didn't find the searches returning very relevant results.

I prefer Bing over Google or any others....I find I get more of what I'm looking for, plus I earn 5 points for every search on my computer or on my phone. I sure can rack up a lot of point researching for projects! Then I can use my points on something valuable like a $5.00 gift card at Amazon....might seem small, but at least my extra searching online is worth something :)

I did for some time, I don't anymore that much only because for code questions Google still wins because it can identify context and DuckDuckGo can't. I do check in and use it. When it gives me the correct site links when asking code questions and questions in general then I will switch to DuckDuckGo extremely fast.

Most of us answer will be "I have stopped using it." Because we are so familiar with Google search result if its changes we cant able to accept that it will take time and the search results also will differ between duckduckgo and google. But duckduckgo is giving us the good result but we fails to accept that :) . I hope it will come back.

I've actually found that DuckDuckGo delivers more accurate search results for my region than Google does for certain topics of research. I suppose that's because it's less riddled with ads... (especially ones that look like SERP listings)

It's great and if you need google then just add -g or similar for other search engines.

In saying this though, I did have a colleague question why I was using duckduckgo. He just didn't understand @michaelgilley points.

Have been using it for a long time mainly because 1) I hate ads following me around with the pretense that such networks know what I like based on some curiosity I might have and 2) I want to support companies that truly prize security and privacy.

Some other co-workers have begun to use it as well.