It is usually more about perceived speed and feels than actual speed. And giving the user a quicker feel is a user experience improvement.
But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.
It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.
I concur that duckduckgo has still room for improvement in the local search area. It has already improved since I switched but I still find myself having trouble finding some local relevant results.
To me this is still an improvement over google always directing me to a localized version of their search and forcing me to tricks to get the global google web search.
And if ddg fails short, I can bang to another search engine or use the address bar to try my search elsewhere.
One guy making a point in a blog post doesn't make a fact.
In my own experience, google is now offering poorer results to the point of being useless. I've been using it to search for error message for about 15 years now. While on the other hand duckduckgo very often nails it with a relevant stackoverflow result in instant answer.
I guess ymmv according to how much you're inside the bubble.
I'd like to see something more factual to show how much ddg sucks at fulfilling queries for info to fix error message vs unfiltered google.
Reading this my first reaction is to ask how much OP has been paid by google to write this piece of stupid, to me this looks like a mix of infomercial and fanboyism.
The title is misleading makes us think he had no other choice but to go back to google but when reading the article the reasons invoked are personal preferences preferences and comfort sprinkled with laziness.
Google feels faster by a small fraction of a second to OP, he asks to be geolocalized and profiled so he can skip a couple keywords in his query and his unreasonable expectations be met by google.
Here's an advice try searching for "pride weekend san francisco" instead of "pride" when you're looking for info about the pride weekend in san francisco. Try searching stackoverflow when you want stackoverflow results (though in my experience ddg almost always features a relevant stackoverflow result and link in ddg instant answer)
And this supposedly is worth renouncing privacy and being profiled and tracked across the internet and mined to oblivion ?
I'm not saying duckduckgo is perfect and will fulfill your every need but what telling the world youhad to switch back to google because ddg didn't fulfill personal expectation of it being google is dumb, really.
But feeling quick to display results is worthless if you have to make 5 queries to find your results, if you actually find it, and in my experience google rarely offers what I'm looking for in the first few searches.
It was not that way until they removed some and modified others search operators from their engine.