As a dev, I google a lot to figure out how to do X.
My experience with DuckDuckGo was that it added 2-10 minutes of filtering for usable results every time.
Do you have an example of a search you've done where the results were much better from Google Search than from DuckDuckGo?
Due to the very topic this HN post is about, I don't think this is a good method - your results might be vastly different from mine.
But let's look at the number of relevant results among the top 5 results for some thing I recently wanted to learn about.
"Comprehension categories" - a rather specific term from category theory
https://www.google.com/search?q=comprehension+category https://duckduckgo.com/?q=comprehension+category
Google: 5/5 (for me) DuckDuckGo: 1/5 (for me)
"comprehension categories category theory" 5/5
I'd hardly say it's 2 to 10 minutes extra work, especially for such an obvious example
Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/CssDXS3
https://twitter.com/jjcollinsworth/status/139066623945075507...
After 9/11 and the Patriot Act, librarians fought the government to keep the reading habits of patrons private as a core duty like doctors pledge to do no harm. Now it's difficult to get people to understand why clicking through to an attractive hammock while browsing Amazon registering in 900 databases and manifesting in ads and cold calls selling tropical vacations and being flagged on some government system as 2% more likely to be a flight risk if let out on bond (who am I kidding, AI doesn't give percentages, it just gives conclusions, looking at a hammock might be that stray pixel that can turn an OCR "O" into a "Q") - difficult to get some people to understand why that would make you nervous.
The answer to that isn't "use TOR to get to a VPN to browse amazon, and pay for that with a burner debit card loaded with bitcoin" or whatever works this week. There isn't really a hammock.
edit: also Amazon has that figured out, some researcher there figured out that they can identify you based on your click patterns and timing. Right now you can choose between 1) an app that will just click on everything silently, or 2) another app by a professor at some midwestern university that will jerk around the timing and positioning of your clicks in a way that throws your fingerprint off. The first app has been banned by every store, and triggers 80 warnings and a waiver that has to be signed with two-factor even if you manage to root your phone and sideload it. You have to compile the second app yourself, with a weird toolchain, and it draws in 640Mb of npm libraries. It's already been updated three times in response to Amazon's countermeasures, and the professor just wrote a paper about the entire method probably being ultimately doomed.
This isn't restricted to just Amazon either; as I understand it, this is the core of the current reCaptcha version (and even more so, its evil twin, reCaptcha V3, which is seemingly so effective it can rely on those mouse events exclusively in most cases)