This might be a place where we have to agree to disagree.

I guess the stark quality difference I've experienced made me assume everyone had a similar experience.

I'm glad people find ddg useful, I want it to grow (I'm using it despite the fact that I personally find the results inferior)

The one place DDG really falls off is correlating searches with results so they do a worse job than Google at giving you what you want instead of what you search for. That is, trying to remember something and typing along the lines of "that thing with the blue guy and the explosion" is more likely to get you a good result on Google when the actual movie you wanted was "green guy and a fire".

Not a huge performance difference but it's there.

It's not clearly worse than google to me.

Virtually all my searches are resolved by DDG. I should also mention that statistically speaking my searches are not particularly complicated, and many are searching for an article or tidbit I had seen before or something where I pick wikipedia as the result.