They're gonna fail because their name takes too long to type. I can hammer off 'google.ca' in seconds, but 'duckduckgo.com' is painful by comparison.
This + some queries take noticeably longer to complete than Google.
Yeah, but the infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang more than make up for those 0.5 seconds lost.
To play devil's advocate:
- ddg.gg is fewer characters than google.ca
- Google reports bogus statistics (e.g. # results fount) and makes you click "Next/Previous" or page numbers. But duckduckgo has infinite scroll, keyboard shortcuts, and !bang.
- Google results include lots of spam. DuckDuckGo evades parked domains by communicating with parked domain registries (I don't know the exact details of this).
- Google links can't be copied with "Copy Link" (because Google wraps itself into links)
- Google doesn't know how to communicate with external services (e.g. WolframAlpha, Weather, etc...)
On the other hand, Google does have a nice cached page view. I haven't figured out how to look at cached pages in DuckDuckGo.
I think DuckDuckGo is very interesting and I think it has a lot of new features to offer.