I prefer DuckDuckGo. Privacy issues aside they just strive to be the better search engine for software developers. And they have an open source platform for displaying a selected tool or result to a software request query called DuckDuckHack.
I've been using DDG exclusively for almost two years now. I honestly forget that I'm using it most of the time. I can "Google" things and I always get what I'm after. It perfectly replaces Google 100% for me.
I think that it's far worse than google. Don't get me wrong, it's still my main search engine, but I find I have to revert to google to find what I want between 30% and 50% of the time.
Agree. I'm in the same position. I find it particularly poor and combining multiple search terms, where it seems to favour the most popular of the terms and ignore the important narrowing keywords important to the search.
Another agree. Also, it is way behind with localized searches.
I'm legitimately interested in what things you have been unable to find. Back when I was still working as an SE there were a few minor things that I'd have to revert back to Google for but for 95% of my "professional Googling" DDG worked for me.
About the duckduckhack platform, I was writing a client for it so that I could make searches without opening a browser[0]. But their api is limited. The searches supported by that platform are limited to short and common keywords, and their main site is not open source at all. Kind of disappointing to me that the only way to get all the search results is with a web scraper right now. I still prefer it over Google for at least trying...