You can use the g! prefix and it will go to Google. I found DDG plenty good enough for my use case, and in the rare case I can't find it there I just use g! and bam.

I thought “g!” as opposed to “!g” was a typo, but TIL both ways work equally fine! Thanks!

Bang commands are such a wonderful feature on DDG. Not just for searching other engines when the DDG results aren't what I'm looking for but also for ecommerce sites. The frontpage of most sites are extremely heavyweight and you have to go through a ton of garbage just to get to a search box. Being able to add !homedepot to a DDG search and have it send me to the search results page at Home Depot and not the DDG spidering of the site is pretty nifty feature. I do most of my searches of shopping sites that way now.

I often use the other ones to go directly to the search I want: !imdb, !w (wikipedia), !rt (rotten tomatoes), etc.

If you still want to support DuckDuckGo, you might want to use a browser that lets you prefix search quesies with a one or two letter combo for the search engine to use. Chrome and Vivaldi have this feature and I think Firefox does as well, although I exclusively use its search bar instead, so I am not completely sure.