I’ve been trying to get used to DDG recently and while I’ve definitely noticed the decline of Google, it’s been subtle for me, but just generally frustrating and just not as good. But that said, I haven’t exactly loved DDG I comparison. It’s okay, definitely works, recent outage excepted, but I often found the results kind of needed more work to make use of, they were more kind, on the topic of what I asked for rather than specifically what I asked within the domain of that topic. It’s more like using a search engine as one would have done some 15 or so years ago. Often if trying to find something out I’d be disappointed by the non specific or irrelevant results and get suspicious and try changing back to google for the same thing and found that though they largely contained the same results, Google would have one or two that DDG didn’t which were closer to the top of the results and were more specifically about my precise query than just the general topic. I think these tend to be things like forum posts where, if my query is a question, someone’s asked basically that exact or very similar question.

I think DDG is mostly working ok enough for me that I’ll persevere but I can’t say it’s been better.