I've been trying out DuckDuckGo (DDG) for a while now and it has some very nice features:
- No user tracking
- Encryption by default
- They don't 'bubble' your searches - tailoring your search based on previous searches (which pushes, possibly more relevant results, down in your results)
- They have some great power features
And it's this last point that has made me jump the google ship (that and the new G+ integration into searches), at least temporarily. Try searching "50 dollars in euros" in DDG and the top result is pulled from wolfram alpha (not just the link but the actual result - at the time of writing €37.74), "array.prototype" gives a stackoverflow question (again the actually question, not just a link), "Ethan Hawkes" pulls information from wikipedia.
But my favorite power feature revolve around adding key terms within your search: want to search
- The mozilla developer network - add '!js'
- Amazon UK - add '!auk'
- Google Scholar - add '!scholar'
- PHP.net - add '!php'
- If you think google would be better for a result - add '!g'
- the list goes on.....
In each case DuckDuckGo just gets out of the way and re-routes your search straight to that site, which is great if you link DDG to your location bar e.g. crtl+L "array !js" and I've searched MDN easily without using the mouse (possible with google or customized browser search keywords, but it's nowhere near as simple!).
Now I've not got anything against google, in fact I really like them as a company, but I'm going to try out DuckDuckGo and see out it goes. If you want to try it out too, here are the links:
Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE, Android, and many more...