DDG for life (honestly the first thing I do with all browsers, mobile or desktop, is swap out Google for DDG).. It's good enough, and when it isn't I can just throw a '!g' on it and hope Google will be better. Mileage varies on that, though. Some people think Google is still the best search engine, and some of us don't (I mean that in regards to quality of search results, not 'Google is evil' or some other emotional metric), if you're still in the former group then switching to DDG may not be your best move.
Google has gamed their search algorithm so much that DDG is IMO objectively better now. Top results on Google for things I'm interested are always trashy fake blogs for affiliate links and things like that.
It's funny, I usually have the opposite experience. I try to use DDG as much as possible for ideological reasons, but I find myself coming back to Google search most of the time because I get better results.
I think it is shaped by your searches. When I am searching for some math term to help my kid do his homework !G is better, but for anything business or media related I stick with DDG results. Not just affiliate links but literally hijacking search with their own content is insufferable.
Related: Can we start an HN trend of replacing the word Google in posts with !G to throw some shade at the evil empire?
Depends how niche it is. More niche things google does well on: that error code, that specific game discussion on Reddit. Duck duck go now does better on searches which will be optimised for google by businesses.
One common search I often compare is searching for a specific topic on Reddit. Google is really annoying there because of AMP but if you search something like “3d printing layer shift Reddit” you will get a full page of results from Reddit and they are relevant. DDG will return about 3 even though there are clearly more, and the rest aren’t Reddit results. So for this kind of search Google produces better results but shittier experience. Still, I will take DDG for this and switch to Google if I really can’t find what I need in the first three results.
