I've set DDG as my default a couple of times, and I find that I end up `!g`ing every search eventually. Maybe it's time to try again though.

Me too! I use !g so much that I end up inadvertently typing it when searching on google.com. The day of reckoning is near - use DDG as intended or just switch back to using Google as the default search.

But you're using it as intended. I'd much rather type "!gi blah" or "!gn blah" than move my hands to the mouse/trackpad to click on the Google Images or News link.

See Firefox keyword bookmarks.

I use bookmark keywords to get access to a cluster or folder of bookmarks instead of mousing. Also not interested in making 9000 bookmarks to reproduce bang functionality: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

Plus you still have to type "bookmark" <wait> "search"

I'm not sure what you mean by wait. It really Works For Me (TM) here. I just type im foo in the address bar and it goes straight to Google images search for foo. Same for maps, Wikipedia and some obscure websites which will never be available at DDG :)

> I find that I end up `!g`ing every search eventually.

Often it is good, sometimes better than Google but in some settings I too use !g frequently. I still try to use it without !g first to give some search traffic to ddg.

I hope they can use the data to improve future searches.

or use !s to query startpage, which is an anonymising proxy for google results (if i am not mistaken)

Does duckduckgo act as a proxy of sorts when using !g?

It redirects your search to https://encrypted.google.com

You can use !sp for that since startpage.com proxies Google results