Casey Liss on using DuckDuckGo instead of Google for web search, summing it up nicely here, including the solution for those who haven’t learned how to search properly:

If I’m doing a search in DuckDuckGo and I’m not satisfied with the results, I just prefix !g to the search query, and I get the Google results I’m used to.

As an added benefit, DuckDuckGo does as much as possible to prevent your data from leaking to advertisers via Google. Instead of sending you to www.google.com, you’re sent to encrypted.google.com. This has several benefits, most notably, preventing advertisers (and destination sites) from seeing what you’ve searched for.

I agree. I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for web searches, mobile and on desktop, for years. It feels good not giving all that information so readily to Google and their advertisers. There’s enough of that going around on the web as it is.