I suspect otherwise. DDG is as good as Google in certain topics, especially programming-related topics. But otherwise, not so good. Sometimes, it feels like it simply has indexed less pages than Google.
But I still use DDG as much as possible, only !g when the results are unsatisfactory. I don't know how much it actually help DDG, though, since it doesn't seem to get much better over the past few years.
The main problem seems to be that Google will no longer surface anything that isn't on a major site, so even when you know that the thing you're looking for exists, it can't find it. Obviously this also implies that it's missing a ton of stuff you didn't know existed but would have wanted to see.
I like this search engine very much. It has all the "alternative" stuff.
Would you mind sharing a few tips (or pointing me in the direction of some tips) for better DDG searches?
I love the concept and philosophy of DDG but the search results I get could definitely be better!
DDG also has a lot of ! shortcuts, not just google.
Interesting, my experience is exactly the opposite (as I mentioned in another comment here). In general searches, DDG and Google return about equally good results, with 10% of the time DDG doing better and 10% of the time Google doing better. With programming-related searches, Google is pretty much guaranteed to return better results for me. Doing the Advent of Code 2020 was the first time in months that I had to consistently do `!g` re-searches, because DDG results were significantly worse.