It has greatly improved over the years. I remember it being unusably bad when I first tried it in 2013, but today I only have to revert to Google once in a while. That being said, there are rare occasions when it fails spectacularly, bringing up totally irrelevant results for simple searches.
It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.
>Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
While I am still personally a huge fan of Google's work in this are and many others, sometimes I long for the days of straight boolean search queries in search engines. I could often find exactly what I'm looking for, and get the same result each time.
Are there any other major or effective engines that allow for boolean queries beyond AND/OR?
A full set boolean queries, while useful for specifying a query, are likely far too computationally expensive at scale. The reason you don't see most major search engines abandon them is because the resources are better spent investing into heuristic algorithms that benefit a majority of the userbase.
DDG feels like it's still using Google's early algorithms, whereas Google has moved to prioritising more question or natural-language based searches recently.
It seems to expect more precise queries, while Google is geared toward "close enough" searches. I've found that DDG is often preferable when I have an exact phrase in mind. Google is sometimes too helpful, correcting errors that are not actually errors and failing to take some queries literally enough.
The main issues I have with DDG are that it doesn't seem to prioritize recent results (which can be good, but usually isn't) and it fails at local results, which is basically by design.