DDG's search results are terrible for me most of the time.

Though DDG as a frontend is quite nice. I use the bang shortcuts all the time. It's actually a better frontend to google's search than google's search itself: I can easily switch between google France results (which emphasize french speaking pages) and normal google results, something that I haven't been able to do in years since google.com/ncr (no country redirect) no longer works when you're logged in with a user account.

Overall I love the idea of DDG's bangs. I've found many of them useful and you can infer those you don't know easily (if !a is amazon.com, then !afr is amazon.fr; !hn is very useful as well!)

For me DDG is sometimes okay. Most of the time though, I want to be in the bubble google places me in. DDG gives me results for someone searching for X. Google gives me the X I want.

One thing that kills me is how terrible DDG is at parsing an address. If the street is misspelled at all you get nothing but real estate listings but if it's correct it shows a ghetto gif map from MapQuest :(

If you just want a map, "!map <address>" will send you to google maps with that address.

I switched to DDG a year ago; it was painless. I think I have gone back to Google for a search maybe twice.

I still use Google Image Search, though that's kind of a different beast.