I use DDG nearly exclusively, and writing better queries is definitely workable. I just throw a couple more keywords and I usually find what I need.
Google does a ton of personalization of search results, whereas DDG doesn't, so it's not really a fair comparison. I've found that, with my better queries, StartPage (anonymous Google results) isn't much better, so the difference is likely Google getting to know you better.
The only personalization they can do is based on my region (IP address), user agent (all the better if "crop image" gives me Linux results), and the fact that this is the only data they have on me. There are no cookies or localStorage. Unless they do browser fingerprinting (which I hope would be big news and would legally have to be in their privacy policy, so I'd know about it), it can't be that custom. I'm quite convinced google search really is just that much better.
The country localisation gets in the way as often as it doesn't for normal usage, but given that I use ddg by default, many of the queries I use Google for are the ones I actually want localised. (Ddg is even worse at searching in other languages, which gets slightly better if you manually change the search language on the results page, but not much.)
I'll give startpage a try. I thought Google blocked (or at least CAPTCHAd) third parties from using the search without paying for every query (their search api is super expensive), so I didn't look for a proxying service before. Thanks for the tip :)
Google does a ton of personalization of search results, whereas DDG doesn't, so it's not really a fair comparison. I've found that, with my better queries, StartPage (anonymous Google results) isn't much better, so the difference is likely Google getting to know you better.