In short, if you last tried DDG a long time ago try again, it is much better.

I used to be one of those people who when I couldn't find something on the duck would repeat the search with Google. But more and more, especially in the last six months, if I can't find it on Duck, it's not on Google, either.

Duck gives me irrelevant results to those queries. Google gives me irrelevant pop-culture results to those queries.

Very much true. Even moreso as of the last 6 months DDG has been even better for some things, especially if they are political in any way. You'll find some crap sites on DDG but you'll also find what you're looking for. Sometimes I want to find crap sites or non-mainstream stuff, and only DDG surfaces that. I do fear a bit tho once DDG gains more popularity, the SEO games may not be kind to DDG.

I tried DDG when it first came out and found it unacceptable. Currently though, it's totally usable and sometimes better than Google.

The whole web is organized and optimized more and more for clicks and watch time. It would only make sense that the results seem to be correspondingly worse.

PS: oh, and in a certain way skewed search results even help Google, it increases ranking mysticism. When one site is consistently high, their competitors cannot know wether that is because of artful SEO or because heavy ad-spending is invisibly tipping the scales. So they will fearfully carry their own advertising budget to the altar of search ranking instead of running ads on a competing network like Facebook. Who knows wether The Algorithm considers ad-spend or not, better not provoke an angry god!

There's a lot else on the web, it just isn't surfaced by Google as much as in the search engine's early years.

Google may have gotten worse, duckduckgo may have gotten better (I use DDG for most searches, so not sure) but the case for duckduckgo doesn't involve them having a great search team, since they don't have their own index.

One thing that I keep in mind is that Bing is not blocking DDG searches like google would, I find this commendable and, morally, a point in their favor.

I'm pretty sure DuckDuckGo has a contract with Bing.

This, but more so. Starting a couple of years ago, Google search quality has fallen enough, combined with DDG's search quality rising enough, that I generally get better results from DDG than Google now.

I sometimes end up browsing fora with poor search tools, and that is commonly when I use a search engine (that or if I'm fact checking stuff, but that's a different usecase). Duck Duck Go always ended up failing to get the results whereas Google managed to get the correct results.

I also have had similar negative experiences with DDG for searching stackoverflow. Google isn't ideal, but at least they do always end up getting me what I'm looking for. With DDG I oftentimes get completely unrelated results which just happen to match the keywords I was using.

Finally the image search would always invariably return porn on DuckDuckGo instead of things relating to the query I was looking for.