I also noticed that, if DDG doesn't find it in my initial search, there's no way on earth I could game the search terms to actually find it. So if my first 1-2 searches give nothing I just add the !g...

I’ve learned just cut out the entire exploratory first couple of steps and just always use !g when searching for anything developer related.

Same thing with bing. It's a fine search engine for lots of things, but for searching documentation it's really weak, showing sites like w3schools and tutorialspoint far above the results I actually want.

It kind of makes sense that w3schools would spend much more time on the SEO game than docs.python.org, but it just drives me back to google

I noticed the exact same thing there. Usually, when I don't get results I just append !g after the search terms, and google yields much better results. But what I'm most bothered by DDG nowadays is that on my phone the first 2-3 results (which on a phone basically means the whole visible area) are quite frequently ads.

It’s actually possible to switch off ads in the DuckDuckGo search settings: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

Awesome, thanks for the tip!

It doesn't need to be better than Google, it just need to be better for its marketshare. If users are mostly dev, than it's a win.