In other words the queries that google has good results for isn't a superset of the queries that ddg has good results for. It's just a different set.
Try searching for “!w search engine”: DDG sends you straight to Wikipedia, which sends you directly to the relevant article. (Search “!bang” for more info about bangs.) When DuckDuckGo is your default search engine you can do this straight from your browser's address bar or OS's search field. It's very nice.
(I have no affiliation with DuckDuckGo; I just really like this feature.)
I thought I'd give startpage.com a try (proxied google results without tracking), but besides being slow I realized I couldn't live without bangs anymore (and was also missing DDG's rich snippets).
I wish DDG had some kind of bang that tells it that I actually want to search for the query I entered, not some random query they think I might have wanted :/
edit: I should mention that after complaining about it on their subreddit, someone on the team said they are looking into it.
! this is exactly what I want
then a way to keep it enabled by default
Also ddg doesn't have anything like Google scholar. Thankfully just a !scholar away, and faster on a slow connection than going to scholar.google.com.
Anecdotally, for every feature I’ve wanted of DDG, I’ve found an old post where someone on their team says they’re looking into it. For some I’ve found multiple posts, going back over a decade! Always the same “looking into it”.
I use DDG, but I put them in the category of companies too afraid to say “no, we won’t do that feature” or “we like that idea, but it’s low priority so we don’t know if we’ll ever get to it”. Whichever features they have, I use; the features they promise, I ignore.
Tip: Type ddg.co/somequery in the address field to quickly get back to DuckDuckGo
Google generally has the best results but for 95% of searches they all find what I need.
But thing is, Google itself seems worse and worse to me. It seems to try harder and harder to decide what I want and only give me that - if X is associated with something topical, only topical links appear. And DDG and Bing follow this problem.
Back when Google started out, they bet the farm on the idea that more links pointing to a document meant that said document was informative.
These days though, i wonder if what we are looking for is more hair. That what we are looking for depends on a context that can't be properly included in the search terms used.
On top of this "naive" metrics like link counts are no longer a viable measure for what to elevate to the top of the search results.
For instance, a certain startup I worked for in the past used a military blog seemingly belonging to a web of Eastern European entities to link to our company website and the CEO advertised it on linkedin....it was pretty fucking embarassing tbh but it was oviously for gaining SEO juice. It worked for a while but now when I search for the same keyword I don't see it in the SERPs.
e.g: When I type "pandas" or "kafka", I get the Python library and the streaming framework. I don't get cute black and white animals and a depressed novelist (what the average person would expect).
DDG gives me a decent mix of results about both Apache and Franz (not only the Wikipedia entry, a variety of books/articles/etc as well).
Never happens with tech jargon though.