Google is pretty trash now and has been for a while to be honest. The removal of features such as using quotation marks for an exact search was part of the downfall. Now Google will basically only show you what it thinks you want and you have minimal (if any) ways around it.

That’s not to say I don’t also agree with you about DDG. The results are leveraged from Bing, which are pretty lacking for some standard searches. You have to search a little differently than you would with Google for better results and filter through more junk websites.

If I had to grade the quality of both, Google would probably be a C+ and DDG a C.

That being said I always use DDG first since I don’t think it’s far off from Google’s quality, it is privacy preserving and still has some features that were nixed from Google. It also has the option to use ‘!g’ in a search to immediately search for the same terms but on Google which helps when their results aren’t working for me.

Ultimately, to each their own but I thought I’d throw in my experiences.