What you describe is a clear regression to pre-Google days where searching was kind of dark art. DDG really needs to improve its usability and try prioritize the most relevant results without specifying extra keywords. Yes, it is impossible to be level with Google in this game. But DDG can surely do much better than now, without any intrusive tracking. E.g. when I search a restaurant by its name from an IP address in Europe, why do I get results with restaurants in the USA? Or when I search for a name from a university IP address, why instead of the researcher with that name I get the name of a second rate sportsman?

Searching Google is the real dark art these days, especially if you don't use personalized results. I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.

At least with DuckDuckGo I know that it's searching for what I told it to, rather than searching for something easier to find, which seems similar to a machine, but completely different to me.

What annoys me with DDG is that it treats a list of words as logical OR; the help page states that

Dog Cat

Will return results for Dog OR Cat

To force to AND one has to quote every word, thus:

"Dog" "Cat"

Which is tedious especially on mobile.

I don't know why they think people would want to default to OR.

> I am constantly frustrated by Google straight up ignoring my most important search terms.

However, on Google you do get an identifier next to the result that shows whether your term is missing from the page or not which allows for weeding out "unrelated" results relatively quickly. It also has the "must include" link so that you can narrow your searches without having to retype the query.

Doing the same search on DDG just shows some results but it's not clear whether my specific terms are on the page or not.

Same here. I often have to switch to "verbatim" results. I hate their too clever "we guessed what you're really searching for! here you go!" results...

Not analyzing IP addresses to deliver more relevant results seems pretty aligned with that whole "respecting your privacy is our main selling point". I gladly add another word to my queries if that keeps DDG from taking a step towards where google is today.

A couple of months back, everybody went ballistic when the EU GDPR declared IP addresses as "personal data". Can't recall any posts/articles that were actually defending this GDPR provision—if you can point us to one, I'd love to read the counter-arguments.

So I believe that there is a consensus that using IP addresses to improve search results would be fair game for DDG. It's also consistent with the DDG promise: "we don't track you".

OTOH, not using them has only marginal effect on user's privacy: (a) DDG doesn't serve ads anyway, and (b) the metadata of user's online activity are still available to three-letter agencies to analyze.

as long as they aren't being stored, it shouldn't matter. You could just read user's IP, use that to filter results, then throw it away

Also IP by itself isn't really that much of a privacy problem. It only becomes a problem when it's used in the process of delinkage of more sensitive information

It's better if the engine does analyze IP to bring relevant information but not keep it related to search history for later analysis.

Bringing all the result pretending everyone lives in US sounds like a crappy strategy.

Also consistency is to be valued. Example: if I say to someone else over the phone to search for "X", then I usually want them to see the exact same search results as I do.

True. As other users noted, when using DDG you have to be more specific simply because DDG doesn't have as much information about you as Google has.

But ... this also means that a DDG search would work well on Google. So a revert-to-Google button could help people make the transition. I suppose that people will become more and more specific in their queries until at some point they never need to hit that "!g" button anymore.