DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine for the past 7 months

Sounds good, but one thing I'd like to know is if the author of that article has any affiliations with DDG.

If by "affiliations" you mean "works for" or "is paid by" DuckDuckGo, it's highly unlikely. DDG is the product of solo founder Gabriel Weinberg (epi0Bauqu). Check out his awesome blog: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/.

I've been using DDG as my primary search engine for the past three weeks. The author here doesn't discuss the downsides, and I haven't found very many either.

Occasionally (say, when searching for specific error messages and things) I still find Google to be better, but for most things I prefer DDG, and I'll be sticking with it for the forseeable future.

I have been using DDG as my primary search engine at home for several months and I've been happy with it. The !commands are of little utility to me, since my browser supports search keywords and I use them extensively. There's a couple areas I can think of that I wish it would improve:

1. Its ability to intelligently bubble up semantic information is very impressive but not as broad as google's, I think. For instance, it is very good at providing an info box saying 'So and so is a rock band from the UK', but what Google can do that DDG doesn't is provide several related youtube videos at the top of the search, because they've proven to be particularly relevant.

2. It doesn't have any way to quickly put the current search terms through image search. It feels very natural in google to click 'images' if I want to learn more about a topic, and I don't have that option in DDG.

3. Its arithmetic and conversions (I believe it uses Wolfram Alpha) are not nearly as reliable as google's. Google is almost scarily good at figuring out when I'm asking it do some math, or to perform a conversion.

When trying out a new search engine, who here searches for their blog name to determine the "quality" of the engine? It highly ranks both of my blogs, whereas cuil did not.