I'd say DickDuckGo has gotten SIGNIFICANTLY better in the past two years. I'd consider the results I get on there to be mostly equivalent these days, and in some cases better, though still sometimes worse. It's finally gotten good enough for me to be willing to switch though.

I find that Bing's results are on par with Google's, but all of the others are basically useless for me.

The trick to get Bing to give you the best results are to change your region (on bing.com) to United States. There are tons of features that are only enabled if you are in the US.

Probably because both use the information they're getting from you to actually improve their services. And that's (probably) fine, since you're giving away your information to get a better service.

I want privacy but I also want good services, Duckduckgo for example gives me a good privacy service but its searches have nothing to do with what I wanted to find.

Google is still the best for very Australia specific searches, and still better than others that scrape from Google. But for most scenarios DDG suits me.

Googles search results seems to depend a lot on who you are.

At the moment I sometimes get better, almost good results which is maybe even more infuriating as it proves they can if they want to, they just don't care.

DuckDuckGo.com is reliably mediocre but annoy me less and it is easier to jump to Google that from google to DDG.

Definitely agree. Most of my searches are mundane and I don't have an existential stake in whether they are slightly "better" or "worse" than what I would get from a different search engine. I always start with DDG because I don't like the business models of its other main competitors. But if I don't find what I am looking for (and believe should be findable) I hold my nose and switch over to google.