I don't think this is true anymore. DDG results have declined significantly as they have become more mainstream.

I'm curious if there's data to back that up.

I would be unsurprised if it's true. The reality that DDG is going to have is that search is almost inherently personal, as an artifact of the imprecision of language and the lack of surrounding context. It applies to some searches more than others, but something like "what is vanilla?" Has a whole variety of answers. What is the substance vanilla? What is made out of vanilla? There's probably 80 different software frameworks that use vanilla in the name. Who knows how many companies have vanilla in their name. Oh, or it could be that you mistyped Manilla, which has its own set of results.

Personalization let's you cut down on that. Maybe this person searches for Python stuff a lot, so there's a good chance the frameworks are what they're looking for. Or, the inverse, this person looks up recipes all the time, they probably know what vanilla is so don't show a full page of "this is where vanilla comes from" results.

Lacking that context, they have to assume the same context for everyone, so either everybody gets a full page of web frameworks or everyone gets a full page of frameworks; DDG has no way to tell which you're probably more interested in.

That hasn't been my experience. At least for my searches, DDG has significantly improved over the last couple of years.

DDG was mediocre for awhile then was amazing for a year or so in late 2018-mid 2019. Then as adoption grew and SEO teams saw more and more traffic through DDG, the results for non-SEO'd sites dropped dramatically. Still better than google in principle, but no longer in practice. I probably g!'d 10 times in that golden age, now I end up searching with google every day.

It seems to me that the efforts blogs go through to beat google make it that much harder for other search engines to create good results as well.

> Bing and DDG don't fall prey to being inundated by SEO blog spam like Google does.

Yeah, if you aren't used enough, it's not worth trying to target you for manipulation. All that really demonstrates is (1) they use different algorithms than Google, so optimizing against Google's algorithm doesn't work on them, and (2) they aren't used enough to be worth gaming separately.

DDG is a billion dollar company, someone's using them :P

Yeah my experience once I switched from Google to bing and ddg is that for everyday items search is much better because it's not inundated with blog spam. I only go back to Google when doing technical/code searches as it still seems to be a bit better on those.