I’ve been using DDG full time everywhere for a year and it was really good but has become pretty bad in the last few months. I begrudgingly have to open Google more and more. Not sure what is up.

Yup, it keeps treating all search terms as optional. My searches all "look" "like" "this" now, and it still omits stuff. Infuriating. Respect my search query.

DDG isn't a competitor, it's a meta search engine, that just uses Google and Bing under the hood.

The history of search engines is more complicated than most people realize. There's nothing weird about a search site using a different engine than you expect. Someday it could use different ones, or someday it may deploy its own.

I think other than Google that pretty much every site has had engines change over the years. IIRC Microsoft had a search site before Bing, for instance, and IIRC AltaVista changed search engine quite often as it struggled to retain relevance. In general, it's not really the engines that people are upset about, it's the parasitic stuff attached to it at the gate entrance.

Also I'm pretty sure it doesn't use Google. Last I knew Bing is used.

That’s not true?