My workflow (return on success):
1. DDG
2. Google
3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand
4. This is information the world was not meant to know
I used to use Google as a fallback from DDG. I haven't had to do that in a long time; now, the only time I use Google is for the specific answer "what does Google return for this".
Brave Search is actually better than DDG these days. Kagi is supreme though
(Also Marginalia for deep search)