You’re right of course, despite the fact that I personally use Bing indirectly via DDG.

That said, my personal anecdata is that, a few years ago, g! Google search results would often find things that DDG didn’t - but today, those results rarely help (hence my OP).

I am not super confident DDG has got better, but it certainly feels like Google’s quality has diminished.

Of course we can blame them for not trying. Why spend the money? Because it's the right thing to do for humanity. But hey Google is not a charity, what matter is stock growth, therefore we're excused of throwing ethics and empathy out of the window as long as in the end shareholders have the comfortable monopoly which allows their investments to generate more wealth with minimum effort.

This is surprisingly wise. Lack of viable competition led google to become decadent. They’re now facing a change in the environment that threatens their business model. Will they change or die? Probably a combination of the two.

That definitely worked for a decade but I have to say it’s rare that I find better results on Google than Duck Duck Go, which is a big change.