averagehuman

I get a link to DuckDuckGo on page 3, and a mention of it on page 8.

On page 2 there is a link to "Duck Duck Geese" which is a local restaurant apparently.

Google's official reason for forcing local search results was that 1 in 5 users were searching for local results. So in this case they are returning results that are sub-optimal to 4 out of 5 users.

I mostly agree with you about Google search results, however I think the decreasing quality is more due to political influence and corruption, rather than SEO-games.