Neither does google anymore though. Their search quality has gone hill dramatically in the last 4-5 years. It basically correlates with wikipedia no longer being the first result of most searches; it was largely replaced with commercialized garbage. Getting the highest quality, unbiased information you asked for isn't really their first priority anymore and it shows.

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

The reason Google, or search engines in general, seem to be getting worse in the eyes of some users, is not the result of the functioning of the engine necessarily, but rather of the content of the web itself.

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.

But somehow, Google, as their last act of "don't be evil", decided to appease SEO people (who were a fiercely vocal crowd shitstorming over every change designed to counter their tricks) rather than ruthlessly pull through with the fight for result quality. If memory serves me right they were actively promoting "acceptable SEO" to lure practitioners away from even more annoying tactics. And then they failed to adapt once three "acceptable" started to ruin result quality. It's anyone's guess (perhaps even to Googlers who were right in the middle of is) wether that happened because of the slow-boil effect, commitment to their appeasing promises or because of plain old corporate complacency.

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 no such thing as "the whole web" - it is simply sites with the most money gaming Google better, and Google being happy for that to happen.

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.

That doesn't explain why DDG's results are improving, though.

This fails to consider the conflict of interest. The more 'commercialized' a site is, the more ad revenue they tend to bring in for google, so they have a perverse incentive to bring them traffic.

And yet people are happier with the results from competing search engines...

Are you saying Google scrapes Yandex and Bing? If not, your response isn't relavant to my comment.

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.

Ah, I understand what you were saying now. Your original comment doesn't quite read like that to me so I misinterpreted it.

This is a very important fact that I feel comfortable to ignore.

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 don't think it's relevant to answering the question "Should I use DDG". I do think it's relevant to know DDG doesn't provide diversity in search results.

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