Another DDG user here, people forget sometimes that you need to search a bit differently with DDG, a bit more explicit as it were with your keywords.

That said, in general DDG results seems to be improving incrementally, while I can’t say the same for Google.

I made the exact same experience. Sometimes when I can't get satisfying results I try to use google, but in most cases the results are even worse. Googles search results just don't make any sense to me by now.

There is one feature that google has which I can't find a good alternative for: Reverse search of images. Hands down, that's a good one, Google.

Tineye was doing it before Google: https://tineye.com

Yandex has it https://yandex.ru/images/touch/

And it's much better than google's. Google will only find same image (different resolution or very minor changes), yandex finds similar images in general. That said google's image search has some use because google's index is still bigger than yandex's. (For people who prefer English interface https://yandex.com/images/)

I've been very pleased with https://www.runnaroo.com.

Yes I really like it as well. The only thing is their image search which doesn't really give me anything useful, so I still resort to google for that.

Yandex image search is way better in my experience. At least for "search by image"