I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good. I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far

I did try DDG and Startpage a few years ago but ultimately gave up because the results were not good. I gave another try to DDG since about 3 weeks and so far the results are pretty good. Not only they got better on the last few years, but for me Google got worse at the same time. Almost everytime I search in Google nowadays, I have to reformulate my search 2~3 times to get decent results. I often need to add double quotes, ask for reddit or specify the language. Google today just tries too much to read my mind, guess what I want and make interpretations instead of just doing what I asked. Because of this huge waste of time, I became frustrated over time. Also, I am French, use English very often (including at work) and live in Japan, so the explicit region filter of DDG is really a bless compared to the obscure and almost always wrong way Google handles this.