Earlier quoted context omitted.
And don't forget to use the bangs that can allow you to check other engines results fast if you need. For people afraid of getting off google, you can always search something like '!g my-search', it works the same for youtube(!yt), google image(!gi), or even hackernews(!hn) And of course the best bang is the 'I am feeling lucky' one (!), i.e.: 'hackernews !'
It's worth noting that the !g bang redirects you to encrypted .google.com, it's more secure but results are often different from a regular www.google.com search. It bugged me for a while not knowing why some queries returned unusual results. ( more here https://duck.co/forum/thread/2880/remove-the-encrypted-subdo... )
I can only see this as a good thing. If I want local search results, I'll add local qualifiers like "USA", "Texas", "Houston"