I'm seeing there's some niche cases where it's worse (especially with some extreme quotation-mark-heavy searches) but I've switched a few months ago and never looked back.
The thing is: Most searches aren't even that complicated. Whatever "magic" (read: extra processing power) Google uses is mostly helping for extreme niche cases. The rest they seem to do, nowadays, is "editorializing" results, pushing popular websites before more relevant ones, displaying results from some internal database, etc.
Not the parent, but a stupid reason why I can't use DDG is that it doesn't support IPv6. It's extremely unhelpful when you're doing some IPv6-only testing and then can't search for answers.
As far as I can tell, 6 years ago the reason was that AWS didn't support IPv6[0]. It has for 2.5 years by now though.
Switched to DDG recently and was pleasantly surprised to find how well it excerpts the top StackOverflow answer for technical questions. Just for this I would it's actually a better option for developers, at least for 95% of your queries.
I should do it more. Maybe exclusively for a week and see how it goes.
I've actually run into Gabriel a few times online and had a bit of conversation with him. Nice guy. Can't really say I've chatted it up with Eric Schmidt...
Once I internalized "just add !g if the results suck" using ddg became practical for me. And I don't know if it's me or ddg actually improves over time but I feel like I'm doing it less and less.
Sometimes Google seems to be better at guessing the context especially if you search for C and some other term that has a bunch of different meanings.
