Even after using DDG for the last 5-6 years, I find myself always using !g with it. So much that, it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily.

Sure, if I just care about US specific results and I am doing an exact term search or maybe StackOverflow result is my target, DDG comes close but Google gets context of things much better. I keep finding much better search results that had more context with my search. I don't know how to quantify/measure this but to me Google Search is still much better.

> it has become a muscle memory thing and sometimes I type it involuntarily.

Same. I sometimes even type '!g' into Google itself by mistake

I ended up with the same muscle memory. That’s why I eventually just switched to StartPage.com instead, which is basically a Google proxy.

I've found personally, that nearly everyone of my DDG searches results in a subsequent Google search with more relevant data. It sucks too because I would rather use DDG on principle alone. I will agree, results in Google do seem worse, but until someone can give Google a run for their money they'll continue down the path they're currently on which is collect all the data for profit. Also, Yandex images, vastly superior.

DDG has been absolutely awful for me. Google has 15+ years of my search history at this point and the improvement that makes on my search results is incredible.

I agree that spamdexing is a huge problem, but could the rise of rel="nofollow" contribute just as much? The vast majority of user-generated content is marked as nofollow, but this is largely the same type of content that made early Google good. I often get better results doing a reddit search than using a search engine. It seems that by ignoring user-created links, search engines are ignoring 90-99% of the signal. The rest of the signal is mostly from commercial and promotional sites, so it's not surprising that these make up nearly all of the top search results.

I often do want results from commercial sites such as nginx.com, but I want results that real people have found valuable and not results that some paid blog post linked to.

I think you forgot to expand your [1]

If you put in a request to DDG to have entries linked to phrases removed from their search engine under EU GDPR or EU Right to be Forgotten, they will have an external law firm write back and tell you they get their results from Yahoo, Bing and other search engines and you need to contact those search engines direct. Google have actually been the fastest at getting my data out of their system, Microsoft never got back to me despite repeated requests, Facebook would rather believe Norfolk Constabulary instead of me despite being the copyright owner. So many criminals control your life, most of you dont realise it.