I live in a country which uses a language I don’t speak but Google defaults to regional results in spite of my language being set to English. All other engines give me really poor results (not that Google was giving good ones, the image search has really gone to shit since they started populating it with AI stuff).
The dealbreaker for me with DDG is they use Apple maps as default and don’t let you change it.
Not exactly the solution you’re looking for but starting a search on DDG with “!gm” will search google maps directly.