I've been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for the last year or so; it's certainly improved a lot. Something that can help this transition is the bang support [0], with `!g` prefixed to your query. This redirects you to google with same query if you find that the results are not satisfactory. I used to use it a lot, but I've found I've needed it a lot less lately.
[0]: https://duckduckgo.com/bang