It used to be that I could search for something, say this:
word1 word2
and Google would give me the results for pages which contain both those words.
Then Google decided I didn't mean what I searched for, so I had to prefix my searches with plus signs, like this:
+word1 +word2
And now this week I find out that even that doesn't work any more.
It's crap. Maybe duckduckgo does it right. I'll give it a go.
All the time I'm having to quote my terms because Google tries to correct them. Same thing with Google disregarding search terms, I always have to prepend those pluses like you do there. Auto-correction should be enabled, not default behavior.
The worst is that a search for "some-thing download" or "some-thing pdf" is positively cluttered with phony search results from torrent aggregators, etc. Why is Google indexing these?
The switch to a JS-heavy page from a simple HTML one means that I inadvertently clear my results with a new, unintended query, or navigate several searches back when I intend to just do one. Sometimes search doesn't even work. "Instant" is a failure. They removed the "Instant off" option from the search page, and I'm sure there's something when you're logged in, but I'm not often logged in to Google services.
Then again, maybe it is just the interface, Google has a cleaner interface IMO making it easier to see results.
And its also likely that i didnt get used to some of the special additions in DDG like tags and what ever else.
But the underlying search is Bing.
Perhaps Google is personalized and Bing doesn't, or perhaps DDG doesn't pass a uid token to Bing, but it's just not as good actual results, which matter to me about 10% of the time. (Luckily, the query parameters to google.com/search are the same as to duckduckgo.com/ so a simple massage of the URL works well.)
As does prefixing your search with "!g".
Go to blekko.com, enter your two words and append /monte to the search. That will put three columns up, results from Blekko, Google, and Bing. Pick the column with the best search results and see which service delivered them.
It is a great way to see what is what.
Blekko was a distant third for my go-to search engine confuser "ruby god" in the three-engine monte, and I was going to write it off for my purposes when it occured to me to try "god /ruby", which to your credit is much closer to being competive with google, and drastically outperforms bing.