I've had good luck with Bing, so now I use that as my fallback.

But honestly, simply forumulating a query appropraiately can help.

Pagerank basically lets you use search terms like circles on a Venn diagram - whatever's in the intersection floats to the top.

DDG requires a little more effort. Putting quotes around words that group together, using - to exclude large chunks of.

I find when I "search like it's 1999" DDG does fine.

(The syntax page has some useful tips: https://duck.co/help/results/syntax)