DuckDuckGo appears to have dragged itself into a position in which it has become less useful whilst still lacking the network and integration advantages of Google or Microsoft.
@mcg Whenever I use it there is always at least two pop-ups from DDG themselves, for things that have no relevance to what I am doing in the moment. Also, they're "correcting" my searches as if I looked using the wrong terms; I didn't but also don't do that by default, you're not good at it like Apple and even then I can't stand that fussy behaviour... "there weren't many results including this word and so we changed your search to a whole other thing" is obnoxious.
There might be other issues but having used Kagi for a short time — I ran through the free trial searches laughably fast — DDG now just feels cheap; unreliable, unpredictable, and unwilling to prove itself by being the best without any bullshit.
@SimonWoods Totally agree. Having used Kagi, DDG does feel cheap. The constant popups for other DDG offerings had started to annoy me as well, they have ramped that up.
@SimonWoods Another happy Kagi user here. My first thought was "Why would someone pay for a search engine?" but I was quickly hooked. So much better!