[no_wizard]

I think you inadvertently hit the nail on the head here, in that DuckDuckGo requires you to know its incantations, and Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all. I can even obliterate the spelling of words and it often knows what i'm looking for.

Now, with that said, if your target is power searchers (like myself) I think you have a better argument, because Google often lacks in some of these areas (like being able to filter by a specific grouping of sorts, like if I want a "dev focused" search, not just filtering by a specific site, DDG has some methodology here that I haven't been able to easily surface with Google)

But there are cases where I've noticed DDG falling behind, like indexing newer content, or being able to filter by time accurately.

[JohnFen]

> Google has gotten really good at not having you to know any incantations at all.

I disagree -- the decline of the quality of Google's search appears to have begun when it started trying to second-guess what I'm searching for, and has continued to decline ever since.