I've using ddg for years but I find myself unconsciously ending up appending "!g" to almost all my searches. DDG results are just really not good, especially if I'm looking up something local.
Because both places give me so much useless crap in the results. Hell… I wanted to buy two nerf guns recently, and I ended up having to go to a 3rd party site called pricerunner.dk because both Google and Ecosia kept giving me shit results from 0 of the Danish toy stores I might actually use. That pricerunner site is terrible by the way, so it speaks volumes when it’s more useful than Google search. I’m not sure why Google search for instance will link me to Amazon.com or Amazon.uk and not an amazon front within the EU where I won’t have to pay import taxes as an example. I have German listed as a language I speak so Amazon.de would seem obvious. Not that I’d ever buy anything from Amazon if it was available from a Danish web store , but it’s an example of just how bad it is.
Finding information was the first thing to disappear from search engines, but now it seems that it may as well bookmark a bunch of stores and go directly to them to begin with. Maybe it’s better in the US but it’s ridiculously bad in Denmark.
I switched to Ecosia two years ago, from DuckDuckGo, and I really don't find myself going back to Google all that often. There are some search there I figure that something should have shown up, but mostly Google can't find it either.
Ecosia started mixing in Google results a few months ago, but I don't feel like it improved the results, if anything it's perhaps a little worse. That's anecdotal and not based on any actual tests though.
Kagi does look more and more interesting, because the issue seems to be the focus on ads and pushing stuff for people to buy. I just feel like Ecosia should be doing more to limit purchasing, given their environmental focus.
Generally though, I find DDG good enough for everyday use. However, a friend of mine once told me she looked up a breed of bird on google for more information and I could barely contain my laughter when I suggested she should have used Duck Duck Go instead. The strange look I got in return reminded me that, for 99.9% of people, Google is 'Search' and that's the end of it.
Kinda like the DDG -> Bing, StartPage -> google type of deal.
It is with recommended by EFF. Seems like a good way to search google without giving up privacy.