In my experience whether Google provides better results or not heavily depends on what sort of information you're seeking. Things I used to find easily on Google suffer both from a serious recency effect and are SEO-manipulated half to death. Try finding anything from more than a few years ago, and the first dozen pages are often more recent pages about more recent topics that happen to have some similar words involved but are less topical to the actual search.

Google's search result quality are taking a nose dive.

my mileage varies...

but when ddg's results are useless, it's possible to add !g in any part of the query and it'll redirect (which for some reason forces me to refresh everyonce in a while before google's results appear)