For example, just now, I came across "ED survivor". No idea what "ED" means here (it's eating disorder).

I just put it into DDG and got nothing on the first page that looked like it could be pertinent: A user name "ED survivor" on Instagram posting about vegetarianism, Ed Stafford on Wikipedia, "ED: The Survivor" (a mod for a computer game evidently), Devil Survivor Full HD (a film obviously, no idea what ED means here), a few more in this vein, until the page ends with the TV series Survivor on Wikipedia.

Google: First hit "Template:ED survivor" in Wikipedia (and that page contains the words "eating disorder". Second hit "Eating Disorder Survivors Wall", third hit "Surviving ED" from HealthyPlace (so it's health-related – and the snippet shown on the result page starts with "Eating Disorders recovery is a long road.).

The rest of the results on Google are all similar, all of them(!) clearly tell me what ED means in this context.

DDG gave me crap, none of the results(!) came even close to answering my question.

This is not a singular occurence, just a thing I wanted to know a few minutes ago. I'd love to take DDG's search results, but when not narrowed down to specific origins with bang commands, the results are usually worthless.

Edit: and before people tell me that I should have used quotation marks around my search terms, great, let's try that: Two results with "We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.". From the top three results, one times out, one redirects to a sports betting site, and one to a product in an online apothecary (nothing to do with eating disorder). Then penis extension. Erectile dysfunction, something general about mental disorder, and again two results about penis enlargement.

I agree that DDG might not be as useful for finding out what ED survivor might actually mean, but Google didn't list too many options, either, it sounds like. If you hadn't been wanting to know the most popular definition but a more obscure one, Google would have not been useful at all. This is something I run into a lot. Some popular uses for terms means I have to add extraneous search terms just to get around them.

But "ED survivor" is with very high probability not about that mod or erectile problems.

Not to speak of obvious spam sites, like DDG presented.

> No idea what "ED" means here

If you don't know what ED means, that doesn't help you.

But more importantly, the search term was "ED survivor". If you enter the solution, I'm not surprised the solution comes out again.

EDIT: And as a response to the other comment pointing our that you didn't know what ED was in the first place, Google is not the be all end all of knowledge... type "ED !w" and figure it out based on the listing in Wikipedia. This is an inconvenience that I don't mind, that's my entire point.

Theirs, and mine, and matches many other Google users. And thinking the opposite is somehow not your... opinion? FWIW, the world uses Google at large, so a theory that says DDG is not much worse than Google requires stronger evidence than the opposite.

I would have loved to be able to use DDG/StartPage, but having frequently tried alternative search engines, I keep coming back to Google, unfortunately.

For me one of the most consistent flaws is that DDG simply doesn't index some forums that Google does.