I've noticed recently that there are already sites trying to game DDG and their results show up among first for some obscure searches, but nowhere else. I guess that's price for popularity.
Its a sign that DDG's search traffic has value, which is a great change from just a few years ago.
I tried to use DuckDuckGo, but even still I feel its results are not up to par with Google, despite Google's results sliding in quality year after year. Qwant has been a decent supplement, the results for general queries are good and on the more specific ones (part numbers, key terms from papers and articles) its equal to or better than Yahoo/Bing.
On specific queries, Google has really dropped the ball. Part numbers get ignored or rewritten, and results are just plain missing (despite other search engines having those key results).
