Ddg does not. I strongly prefer the ddg behavior. To each their own.
Don't even remember. It was mostly technology, history, academic papers, games, movies, and so on. I'm someone whose good at working around search engines but has a bad memory. I'm unfortunately not a good test case for the input as I get good at unconsciously working around problems to make a better baseline. I did have to regularly switch over to Google, though.
"but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?"
I didn't know about that feature at all. Thanks for telling me. I was going to run search through DDG and Google next time I have trouble to document the difference. Now, I'm considering doing DDG, DDG w/ Google option, and Google itself to see what the per-user customizations bring vs anonymized Google.
"If the difference always comes down to google search personalization"
I didn't think about that angle with Google. Surprised I overlooked it. I don't think it was affecting my search as a lot of it should have a large number of searchers. The esoteric stuff definitely got better results in Google over DDG's default, esp CompSci papers. Before I had Search Link Fix, I would type them into DDGo to get an actual, non-Google link to the PDF. This usually worked but some papers didn't exist in DDG at all. Even though they probably should've indexed the site (eg a university). So, it was clearly a deficiency. Other times, it was an obscure site that's been around a while but maybe low traffic dropped it out of a cache or something. Google had it since they store pages & have been for long time. (shrug)
So, maybe I can collect these into a little pile of files to drop on the team for their debugging.
"so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there."
Worst-case scenario. It's happened to me on occasion when a common term, esp reported in any news outlet, flooded my results with garbage. Eliminate it hoping to filter the noise. Usually works but this time the signal went out with the noise. I'm not so harsh on search engines with things like that since people in support forums drop all kinds of jargon that may or may not be related during discussion of a specific problem. I think that causes the bad results.
Out of curiosity, though, I ran your example. Your example is weird. They get the same top result with next best on one being a StackOverflow answer while another looks at StackExchange. I don't know what you were trying to do where I can't gauge the effectiveness of the answer. Here's a pastebin with the top 5 results I'm getting as of today:
Did one or both have the answer?
What search terms are you using? Ideally, could you provide some searches that perform poorly on ddg, but well if you prepend g! to the term (which runs an anonymized google search)?
If the difference always comes down to google search personalization (so you can't provide a search others can repeat), that would also be interesting to know.
Here is the only query I ran in 2016 (so far) where ddg's results convinced me to use google, and then I found my answer on google:
drmSetMaster permission denied
The correct answer is to install xorg-server-legacy, and edit Xwrapper. I was looking for the now incorrect answer about setting some X binary setuid root. Both search engines provide lots of very out-of-date results, so I filtered ddg on setuid about half way through my search there.
Calling this query a "win" for google is questionable, but it is their top performer for me in the last year. Also the page with the answer does contain the string setuid.