My experience is that DDG results are now on par with google's (minus the brute force effect that the country selector is on local results. Without it, no Irish sites can be found, with it, Irish blogspam will get rated above the site I want, so I need to keep toggling it).

This isn't really down to any huge improvement on DDG, but rather a decline in Google's results. I'd just been putting it down as a consequence of Google having less data on me as I made a conscious effort this year to diversify my usage of other sites.

DuckDuckGo isn't yet on par with Google and will never be (hopefully) because that would mean they keep track of users searches and other data, which is the reason most of us don't use Google for. Privacy is not free, and a bit less accuracy when searching online is a small price to pay.

However although DDG is not going to surpass Google in that field, it is indeed getting better and better every year, and there's one thing it could seriously spank Google's ass: implementing a working discussion filter. The discussion filter was one of the most useful filters Google once had: using it in a search meant one would get only results from blogs, forums, Usenet etc, that is, comments from users of X rather than sellers or advertisers promoting that X. It wasn't perfect but helped a lot to filter out shills, astroturfers, fake forums and similar trash, therefore it didn't suprise me much when they removed it probably because their sponsors didn't like that function. So why not implementing it back at DuckDuckGo?

Yes! That's all I want back! Reddit is a great source but some of the best discussion happens on forums that you have no idea about.

DDG uses bing's API to get those results. They don't have their own search algorithm

Google doesn’t show website names anymore either just breadcrumbs

Same here, I’m getting pretty bad results. The SERPs for me include either news results which I really am not interested in or spammy auto-generated stuff that has almost no relevance.

If you're looking for alternatives, DuckDuckGo has made vast improvements over the last 6-12 months. Tried switching about a year ago and went back to Google due to low quality results.. Gave it another whirl this month and the difference is night and day. I've barely used Google since. Definitely give it a shot if you haven't recently, you may be pleasantly surprised!