I do all my searching using the firefox search bar - CTRL+K FTW! I've used DuckDuckGo as my primary search provider for a couple of years now. The "bang" searches are where it really, really shines. It takes a while to get used to but there are so many and some of them are extremely useful. For those that don't know starting you query with a bang - term does a site specific search. e.g. !g <SEARCHTERM> - searches google. That's right they let you search google instead of their own search engine. The number of bang searches is overwhelming so my advice is just to learn a few you find most useful. hey soon became an integral part of searching for me. These are my most used: !g - google !i - google images !gt / !gten - google translate (English) !yt - youtube !a - amazon !w - wikipedia I don't think there is any question that google's search engine is the best, but I hate the tracking and lack of privacy with google. At first I found myself relying on !g quite a lot, but over time it's become just a safety net when DDG doesn't get me what I need and that's really quite rare nowadays.
I do the same. My default search is DDG and that's usually enough and I don't even realize that I'm using a different search engine. Sometimes I have to tag a !g at the end of my search if I'm having trouble finding what I need and that's totally fine with me. Though, considering I use GMail and google owns everything about my phone and searches there, I'm not sure if using DDG has any effect on my personal privacy beyond giving them traffic and legitimizing them.