totally agree that for ~5-10% of searches DDG is not as good as google.

When DDG fails, I just re-run the search with "!g" and it goes straight to google and I'm good.

The problem is knowing when it is failing. How can you know what you may be missing? How can you know how much time you are losing by not getting the best results? Etc.

Yeah, I used DDG for about a year. It just became such a pervasive weight I went back to google. Despite the crappy seo it is still less of a pain / faster than ddg - but I know google is not surfacing high quality results from sites I found through it years ago. At this point, the web is far less useful than it was, mainly because you can't find the good sites anymore. I am going to give kagi a spin, since I really wanted to make something non-google work, and google looks like it will never improve. This feels exactly like my back and forth with linux as my daily driver. It took 15 years, but it eventually became the least bad option.

Yeah, the dreaded !g in DDG is an all too familial feeling.

I have been using Kagi for four months now, and can happily report that I resort to it less and less, and even when I do it is mostly due to muscle memory from years of DDG.