> I've lately seen myself using the !g flag for a lot of my searches because it seems inevitable when DDG results don't match up.
DDG and Verbatim-mode Google searches are pretty equivalent, in my experience. Google seems better because it makes the assumption that what you "really" want is what everyone else wanted, which is annoying when it's actually getting it wrong.
Huh, surprisingly for me it was the opposite. I tried to switch to DDG 4,3,2 years ago, eventually coming back to Google due to the need to use !g very often. But in the last year or so it became a non-issue, so I finally switched.