Google is better than Duck's backend (Bing or Yahoo, IIRC)

However, I find that most of my queries don't require Google to find the result. Maybe once every couple days I do a search, don't like the results, and then add a "!g". Most of the time it's fine and I get to avoid Google's ecosystem.

Yeah, same. Switched my default to Duck about a year back although I've still got Google on mobile (something I only just clocked as I type).

Google search had degraded so badly pre-AI, I was already finding it equivalent for most things. The odd few searches benefit from Google, but nowhere near enough to warrant them as a default.