It's been more obvious that they are losing against SEO in the past few years. When searching for programming results it is rare for an authoritative source to be be above w3schools or geeksomethinggeeks. Even with a specific query for something that is not a beginner tutorial you have to wade through that shit to even get to stackoverflow answers.

Either google engineers have really started to dig w3schools or they don't eat their own dogfood any more.

It's still good compared to the rest, but it's not nearly as good compared to its past self. You can almost taste the regression, and it's not the linear one.

DDG is a search aggregator, and uses a bunch of different engines behind the scenes. One of them is Bing. They provide a list of the engines they use.

Personally, I find DDG gives me the best results of all the engines I've tried, including Google. But plenty of other people have different experiences. My hypothesis is that it depends on what you're searching for and how you write the search query.

I have a suspicion that Google's search results are of much better quality if you allow them to track you. I still do (mostly out of laziness, I have to admit) - and I frequently find myself cursing at the uselessness of DuckDuckGo's results and using Google instead.

I did that experiment a while back. I think (but it's hard to tell) that I perceived the quality falling for me in that case.

Much of the problem with Google is that it's trying to make a guess about what I /really/ want, when what I really want is to find sites that contain certain words or phrases. Tracking me is irrelevant to that task, and if my online behavior affects the search results I get, that can't improve things.

I don't want a search engine to find me answers. I want it to search for web pages.

I like DDG because it (mostly) does what I want a search engine to do.

I'm not really bashing Google here, it's just that Google is a tool that accomplishes something different than what I need accomplished.

The one place where I think tracking helps (though it's just a gut feeling - I don't have evidence) is when disambiguating search terms that can be interpreted different ways. Google knows that the tech-related interpretation is probably the one I'm looking for, while DDG doesn't.

I do a better job of disambiguating than Google can do, especially if Google is paying attention to my internet or search history to do it.

If I'm searching for something, it's very likely to be something a bit unusual for me to search for. If it's in line with what I need regularly, I don't search -- I go to my bookmark library.

It's definitely the case - search results in private tabs are less relevant for me.

I think the extent of this depends on 1) how long you've been using their search and other products, and 2) how much your interests diverge from the "average".