But yeah, saw that I had south africa enabled. Still makes little sense but explains a bit why the result is so weird.
Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
Sometimes though, I do have problems finding what I'm looking for (when it is obscure) so I pre-pend !g in front, but generally it's not much better ...
The only options are: Google, Bing, AOL, Yahoo, Ask.
To get DDG you'll need to use a different browser like FF.
I actually blocked Chrome on my phone and started using FF once I noticed that Chrome was updating itself even though I was requiring manual updates. Play Store and Google Play Services do the same thing, but don't have a good alternative for them,
Yahoo's search business was always odd... They had their own search, then switched to search powered by Google. Then they purchased Overture, which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista. Overture had originally purchased AlltheWeb from FAST, who had pivoted into the enterprise space, and later got bought by Microsoft and integrated into SharePoint.
> AOL & Yahoo is really Bing What? I don't get that -- I don't know about AOL, but I thought that Yahoo does its own crawling (their Slurp bot)
Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin! That makes a gigantic different in mobile web performance. On my laptop I've been using Safari as my main browser because it consumes far less memory, and it seems to handle mountains of tabs a lot better than Chrome.