Tack “&udm=14” on to the end of a normal search, and you’ll be booted into the clean 10 blue links interface. While Google might not let you set this as a default, if you have a way to automatically edit the Google search URL, you can create your own defaults.
I just wish I could search a term of more than 2 words and get relevant results rather than pages that contain at least one of the words in high volumes. That’s the only reason I ever use google, for years now. Encasing the words in quotes doesn’t seem to function at all on DDG, either.
I’ve found that search engines in general, including Google, really don’t like to listen to the whole thing I typed in.
DDG has had cost issues with some of the more complex queries. Exclusions (-) for example are very expensive, as Bing recently raised their prices. I think this is why search has gotten worse with DDG recently.