In my usage over the last few years, I've come to rely on StartPage for good search results (since it's a proxy for Google). While DDG has improved over time, it still is nowhere close enough to be a Google replacement for me. I end up doing searches on DDG only to repeat the same on startpage.com to get better results. DDG still does not have time based search (where you can search for results in the past day, week, month, etc.), which is a huge disadvantage for me.

I do use both StartPage and DDG, although it's more like a 80%-19% split between these two. The remaining 1% is still on Google to get things like news, and Self-Destructing Cookies [1] helps keep things clean on that front.

[1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/self-destruct...

Have you tried https://startpage.com ?

DDG results have greatly improved over the last year. I tried switching from Google to DDG a couple years ago, but didn't last more than a week. DDG results are as good (and nicer looking) than Google for general searches, but I still rely on Google for needle in a haystack searches.

Yeah, I doubt that DuckDuckGo could compete with PageRank in its first iteration.

There is a reason that Page and Brin are billionaires: their algorithm was absurdly clever.