Google's search engine is awful. In case you hadn't noticed rants about it are increasingly popular. Part of the reason is that Google keeps taking away user's control of the tool, partly in the name of convenience but also to manipulate you, get you to click on favored links, show you ads or extend their search monopoly to other products.
I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.
1. Never heard any rant about it outside tech circles.
2. I've given DDG many chances when Google failed to return satisfactory results. In those many cases DDG results were just about the same or even less relevant. Google changing the query? Well DDG either also changes it or returns irrelevant results not containing the query anyway.
The single advantage of DDG I've noticed is that it doesn't CAPTCHA me on a VPN connection.
I'm not arguing that duckduckgo/bing are any better, just that these tracking convenience features have a dark side and many times work against your best interest.