I find that I get more relevant answers with DDG, but in the rare cases where I need a look at Google, I just append !sp to my search term. For the sake of privacy and just to support a search engine that is fighting tracking, I'll gladly give 3-4 extra keystrokes to support it.

Same here, so [shameless plug] I wrote http://goosegoosego.com which is just a redirector for Google/DDG which you can trivially run locally. It defaults to Google, and you can search DDG via !ddg

It gives you the advantage of having access to the !Bang syntax (https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html), while providing IMO better search results via Google by default.

Ya know you can just do !g right? Also you can get google results by using startpage. I default ddg then fall back to !sp (startpage) if I don't get what I want.

I know how you feel. Does anyone else feel like a niche search engine is the only way a smaller player can get quality results?