Google has personalized search enabled by default for users, which makes it feel more "relevant", of course you get this by sacrifacing any means of privacy. For me, I don't mint unpersonalized results, however, my reason for stopping using ddg is a bit unorthodox one; the overall search performance (as in the time you need to wait until the results load) was significantly higher than Google's. I still believe that Kagi is a game changer.

For me it has been the reverse. I tried DDG many times over the years, but results were always lackluster, especially for local Norwegian results.

But a few years ago Google became so bad, I changed my browser default to DDG, and frankly I can count on two hands the number of times I've needed to go to alternatives since. Especially Norwegian content has gotten good enough in almost all cases.

That said, it's not perfect, there's still stuff it struggles with.

That was because Bing wasn't as good as Google, but now they're kinda even... because Google became much worse.

ddg pretty consistently fails to return expected a results, compared to google.

It’s a shame, I don’t want to stay with google, but it still does best fit my needs for search.

Ex: tumblr.com/ddgvsggl