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I made DDG my default, and it's great for 95% of my usage. For specific things where I know there should be better results, then I add a !g or !gi to the search query, which redirects to google or google images.

Yeah, I have done the same. DDG is pretty decent! ... and, I totally did not know about the !g/!gi, thanks for that!!

Check out bangs: https://duckduckgo.com/bang

You usually don’t even need to remember them, for most somewhat popular sites you can just guess the bang, and it searches there.

Ah nice, thanks! I feel like I've seen that page before and just totally forgot about it. haha :)

This. Everyone talks up DDG but it is literally one of the crappiest search engine out there. You never get what you want immediately. I think Bing and Searx are better options compared to DDG.

I thought DDG was bing, just with some privacy

Every time I search for something on DDG and there are no/few results, if I do the same query on Google I only get the insane spam/"hacked small business" websites with random SEO that redirect to arbitrary ads.

And of course Google's own promoted results which are usually only vaguely related to the topic (for example if I search something programming-related, I'll get ads for Udemy or whatnot, but not even a specific course)