Discussed at the time:

Compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821248 - Dec 2023 (465 comments)

Why not DuckDuckGo?

Duckduckgo mainly uses Bing for its search results.

"Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing."

https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources

From the appendix:

“DuckDuckGo: in the past, when I've compared DDG to Bing while using an ad blocker, the results have been very similar. I also tried DDG here and, removing the Bing ads, the results aren't as similar as they used to be, but they were still similar enough that it didn't seem worth listing DDG results. I use DDG as my default search engine and I think, like Google, it works fine if you know how to query but, for the kinds of naive queries in this post, it doesn't fare particularly well.”

people who don't use ddg believe ddg=bing; there is no point in debating that

The “Appendix: FAQ” section alone is well worth reading.

I tried the opening example

>Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term.

and the third result on google.co.uk for "youtube downloader" is "yt-dlp without a doubt the best way to download youtube videos"

I guess search is kind of tricky.

Wonder how much of that is related to location-specific results?

when I lived in Singapore several years ago, local Google results would often be wildly different 'normal' google.com results