I had the same problem with an almost automatic !g.

A while back i decided to put more effort and try to survive with !so, !gh, !hn, !r, !w, and a couple more depending on the context.

DDG may not give exact results in less than a second, but i believe that blindly giving priority to the fastest result is a critical issue, in many areas.

For the very niche topics, i basically maintain myself lists of sites.

I still use !g as fallback or when i'm too lazy. And also for pentest reconnaissance, i have a hard time seeing how to do it without Google honestly (which is scary).

Page load of DDG is not quite good indeed, but i don't mind let it a few seconds.