Many of my searches are initiated by selecting text, e.g. a place name, pressing the context menu key and selecting desired search engine from the Context Search list, viz:
But, mostly I'm lazy and just press 'S' which uses the default search engine. Now that I've rediscovered how to make DDG always open links in new tabs I should switch back to it as my default. And I might see if I can coerce Context Search into being more effective.