You know, years ago I figured that nothing was worth the time to switch away from Google. But today, Google's results are so bad and everything else has so gradually improved that I switched and basically didn't notice.
I think Google moat is mostly in our heads at this point.
DDG remains "merely good", but given that Google has sunk to "kind of garbage actually". My favorite thing about it, weirdly, are the bang codes. Going "!w Mutemath" and just winding up on Wikipedia (!mwt for the thesaurus, !yt for youtube, or !wten for wiktionary are some other favorites) have been the handiest.
The fact that the goal of the site seems to be "uh, just search, actually???" has been a godsend. Google being an advertising company with an incidental search engine is just kind of a mess, so I'm happy to stick with "merely good" at this point.
My understanding, citation desperately needed, is that duckduckgo is just bing with all of the "features" stripped off.
Despite this, it is probably the most functional search engine right now. Which is more a statement about how bad it's all gotten than anything else.
The !bang operators are the best thing about DuckDuckGo, and it's only weakness. If one of the !bang operators breaks, it's a pain in the ass to get them to update it. The ones for GOG and GameFAQs are still busted despite going through their update form twice.