Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG disappoints. and that happens frequently (although definitely not always)

I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.

That's my experience as well. I'm on DDG for a few months now, and I often resort to using Google when DDG doesn't give me the results I want.

How much of that is down to them missing the familiar look of the Google results page?

I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked to use a white-labeled search page where the results are served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed. They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3 months, and rank their satisfaction with it.

I imagine the results would be similar, but people would still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around for 20 years.

I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.

Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.

Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.

(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)

In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.

Microsoft did something like this almost a decade ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/bing-it-on-microsoft-claim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing#Bing_It_On

It was marginal, in favor of Bing, though I don't think they did extended experiments with individuals.

I really think DDG should at least search for results of "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more than Google.