It is in some use cases. For programming related queries, it oftentimes gives me better results than Google because it's not trying to be clever and guess what I could actually mean.
I second this, notably for programming related queries. I have been using DDG for a year or so now, and never looked back.
I do not quite agree. I found that duckduckgo often returns too many results from the same website, which is for programming related search queries often stackoverflow. The same query on Google leads (for me) often times to more diverse results which include more different base urls.