I've used DDG for about a year straight now, it's adequate but I find myself needing a !g at least once a day. Searching DDG for error messages & recent events from the news tab are really lagging behind what Google provides unfortunately.
I use !sp if I want to see Google results. I only use it two or three times a year for critical searches that I want more than one result set for but it may suit your needs. Google News is pretty good but I prefer Inoreader anyway, !ddgn is usually good enough for me, for specific news searches.
The issue I had more often is random captcha's for sites I actually need to use not letting me through. (Thanks school).
My solution for this is to keep de-googled Chromium installed, and just use it when I run across these sites.