And bangs! They make it so that ddg is the only sensible choice for default search.

If I need to search on google for some reason, I can just append !g. If I want to look for Youtube videos, I append !yt. I can even search for grocery prices directly with !appie.

I've been looking for a better search engine lately. DDG results seem to be nearly the same as Bing results. I.e. still not that great, though has better privacy policies. IDK why search engines don't de-rank listicles, extremely long recipe pages, pages with tons of ads, etc. Major search engines are so bad now, it seems like it would be relatively easy for a startup to overtake them. I guess there's a large barrier of entry due to the infrastructure needed to crawl the entire internet and store indexes.