I switched from Google after the DDG redesign a few weeks back and the slowness is getting to the point that I am thinking of reverting. I considered Blecko, but the few queries I tried were far worse than DDG. I would consider Bing but the design is horrible.

One nice thing about the bang syntax is that if DDG fails I can easily rerun the search on Google. I don't end up switching back to Google out of frustration after a bad search.