I’ve been trying DuckDuckGo recently and already started seeing some better results. I’m not ready to change my default search engine yet, but if it keeps up I could see that happening sooner than later.
I recommend reading the actual paper this article is about. DDG is actually by far the worst by their measures. Google is 9% spam compared to 31% for DDG and 23% for Bing. That's a huge difference.
I would recommend trying a SearXNG instance if you haven't before. You can combine results from multiple sources. I use Google as my main source while also having access to the DDG-style !bangs.
My family was looking for a specific manual and couldn't find it on Google, the only search engine they know about. It was one of the first results on DDG.
I'm using DDG for a while now and I'm happy with it overall.
Been using DDG as my default for about 4 years now. It’s actually just gotten better as Google has gotten worse. I used to use the bangs a lot to check Google from DDG, but do that less and less.
Same on the default search changing, I'm very much used to Google Search and it's gonna take me a while before I switch. Though I've already managed to switch from Gmail and it's kinda refreshing, so this will be just another step.