I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for.

Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.

I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.

Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since.

For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.

I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again.

But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google.

I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.

I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.

Non-English queries have usually poor result.