I don't think these reasons are so strong. If you're not signed into Google, you don't need to worry about tracking. And you can turn off personalized results: https://www.google.com/preferences. The Bang sytax is usually worse than doing a Google site search, since Google usually does a better job ranking a site's content than the website itself.

Turning off personalized results doesn't stop Google from tracking you, it just stops leveraging that tracking for your benefit.

And I misspoke about the bang syntax: it actually runs a search on the target website. If you search for "foobar !g" on DDG, it redirects you to this page: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=foobar. Same as "kitten video !yt" redirs to https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kitten%20video.

edit: I misread your comment about goog's site search indexing vs a site's native search. That is entirely site dependent. And it's still only a "kitten videos site:youtube.com !g" away in DDG.

I would bet money that Google "anonymously" tracks you regardless of whether you're logged in or not. And by anonymous, that's only until someone data mines the dozens of searches you do per day.

Does the mainstream audience care about all that?

Does everything have to be about mainstream audience? I don't know if DDG's goal is to take over Google's market share, but I can say that, as a (wannabe) hacker, I've been using it as my default search engine for the past year or so.

What seduced me was the reasons stated by my grandparent comment (and the fact that good ol' Google search is a "!g" away).

Not everything has to please the mainstream. Discussing whether DuckDuckGo is a good name is one thing. But to questions the features of the engine on account that it's not "mainstream" misses the point. I think.

As a matter of fact, not everything has to be about mainstream audience, it depends on the product.

http://scholar.google.co.in is not meant to be a mainstream product.

Where as http://google.com/search is a mainstream product. And DDG thinks itself as Google's competitor with a heart for privacy, that's their USP.

So yes, as far as DDG is concerned, mainstream matters. It's a generic search engine, not a vertical for scholars or the like.

They do if it gives them what they perceive to be better results. (Specifically the lack of filter bubble)

Agreed. But my reply will be a classic "try explaining that to my mum".

I agree that the benefits are not well understood to those outside of the tech world and to them DDG is definitely a me-too site.