I have been using ddg for a good amount of time now and every day I have to use !g to search on Google because the results are too literal. I like the privacy stand that they are taking but it's not close to the search relevancy for a lot of queries.

Being literal is one of its best features, I think, at least in comparison to other search engines. I don't want a google-style filling my search in with long lists of antonyms, related words, or context-changing term reordering... Words that literally mean the same thing are fine (although ideally that would be a selectable setting), but substituting words for something only peripherally related is not.

I try to use Duckduckgo, but end up resorting to google a lot, because the personalized searches are useful. I end up looking up Django documentation a lot, and if you try searching for "Django" on DDG, I end up with the film. Google knows I want the web framework.

Would there be a way to be personalized and anonymous at the same time? Or is that an oxymoron?

I use DuckDuckGo mostly, I always want a specific part of the Django documentation, say so I don't get the movie links (except for an ad).

As you say "django" gives you the movie, but "django class based views" gives you what you would expect.

For most search I feel that DuckDuckGo has become increasingly good, while Google has become worse. It might be because I don't login or flush cookies when I close my browser, but that would mean that Google rely on personalization to a disturbing degree.

Sure, but it was a kind of general example I was giving. My problem when I specify class based views, is that it usually takes me to version 1.3, while Google points me to the dev version (usually I want the most recent stable version so neither is perfect in that respect, but Google is usually closer).

Well, they could do client-side filtering/sorting, saving the personalization parameters in local storage. It'd require the server to send a bunch more results up front, though, otherwise the client would have little to work on.

ProTip: !sp will give you StartPage proxied Google results. Google search goodness without Google tracking.

My progression is DDG => !SP => !G