I use DDG since many years and it was never as good as Google, but for most things it served me well enough as a default. But lately it has become almost unusable. Whenever I search something that's more than a single word, it just seems to pick one random word out of my query and then shows me slop results that are vaguely about that thing. To be fair Google does that too, but on Google using quotes helps, while the quoting operator is completely broken on DDG since years. It's at a point where I can't even find the name of songs that aren't super well known, but not fringe either, using exact quotes from the lyrics. This is especially weird because Bing, which is the source of their index, is much better. Have they just abandoned search and are pivoting to AI and their email alias service?
Sorry for the rant, but I'm wondering if it's just always been this way and I have just put up with it until now or whether DDG actually got worse.