DDG is much faster than Google for me. All Google services are very slow when I'm logged in. GMail, Google Search, Finance, YouTube, everything. They can take 4-8 seconds to load a page, and sometimes they hang indefinitely.

Incognito mode or a different browser brings Google back to sub-second speeds, but it's frustrating enough that I set DDG as my default so that straightforward searches resolve quickly. I switch over with !g whenever I need better search results, news, etc.