IME, Duck Duck Go is not a usable alternative - for any 'kind' of searching. And not because it knows less about me: I would copy text directly from a web page and not have it show up.

It's particularly bad for academic journal searches. Since those pages change so infrequently, this points to further shortcomings in the breadth of their search methods. Ostensibly, they are polling 'many' sources, but whatever their strategy, it's not working.

Is there a reason why startpage never gets a look in, but it's always ddg? I get better results with sp.

It's probably just that people have heard of DuckDuckGo and it's good enough to not make it necessary to search for a better performing alternative.