True, but that could also be because they have other people's info. My primary search engine is still Google, but sometimes for fun i do use DDG and it serves way better pages than bing or yahoo.. It's just way too awesome. I'm not against data collection until it's for the benefits of the user, and duck duck go might be doing just that and anonymously. Google too, but they have way too much information about us than they should (which is kind of their business model, adsense). But i hope to see this project grow, for the healthy competition sake. :)

Isn't DDG a meta-search engine based mainly on search results from Yahoo/Bing and Yandex (from Russia). It is. And that's why it has this rather annoying latency or load time until the search results show up. And the results are only good for English and Russian. To cover up the deficits the return to quick guesses as first results like cached results or snips from Wikipedia, Yelp, etc and some other community curated so called "cook receipts". It's great that DDG exists, and it works great within its constraints, so don't get me wrong.

Ideally, the world needs more internet search engines - as of now only Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu come to my mind. And various initiatives like Cuil, Wikia Search, etc failed or good ones like Exalead (EU sponsored Google competitor, bought by Dasault), Blecko (bought by IBM for Watson) got bought and vanished for general public but are still active for internal company purposes.

And why do we need more web search engines? Because of the filter bubble, censorship and privacy concerns, etc. - it's never good to have to deal with a mono- or duo-poly (which is already reality, as in most countries on 1-2 of them return really good search results, and the others are barely useable for local native language search phrases).

This, searching tech related topics, world news etc. works well enough but when I try to search for (not english) local content the top 10 results often aren't even specific to my country.

It seems to be just lumping results together by language without putting enough weight on location.

Funny thing is, I have just the opposite issue with google. While traveling, it constantly tries to force me to use the local version even if I don't want to (redirecting from google.com etc.) which puts more weight on local results.

We have the chicken and egg problem there. Google have that results because it has terabytes of information on everything and that's because millions use it. If more and more people start using DDG, their results will also improve.

As someone in the UK, I agree with this. I try to use DDG as often as possible, but Google always provides better results.

...and if you don't use English it's pretty much useless.