DuckDuckGo.com is my daily driver.

I love the concept of DDG and have it as my standard but still use Google (via !g) for about 30-50% of my queries. Simple queries work well in DDG (which is basically Bing) but more complicated queries only really work in Google.

Sadly I've been finding the same result. Exact searches on Google are often frustrating, but lately they've been all but impossible on DDG. It seems that all search engines (including those backing DDG) are getting on the ML train and assuming they know what I'm looking for better than I do.

I understand this being default behavior, but there really needs to be a way to disable it.

DDG has become my first stop. It gets me what I need 90% of the time.

I found the opposite. I started using DDG when I moved to Brave but after a month, I found I would go to DDG, search page after page and get frustrated and open google and have my result on page one or two.

I've heard others say similar things. That's simply not my experience. I wonder if it depends on the sorts of searches that we each tend to perform?

For me English has been working decently on DDG but last time I tried I had a really hard time getting decent results in other languages.

Qwant might be a good option, as it's European it should be better for searching in (some) other languages.

https://lite.qwant.com/