I find the signal to noise ration on Duck Duck Go extremely good.
Most technical queries bring far better results than Google queries that additionally are optimized by using +"keyword" and -"keyword" syntax and more operators.
The developer is quite open about his project, often dropping interesting bits of information along with plenty of code. Like the following URL containing the code he uses to integrate with WolframAlpha (Open sourced).

In reply to Re: Duck Duck Go - a search engine implemented in Perl by mulander
in thread Duck Duck Go - a search engine implemented in Perl by metaperl

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