Look at the DDG hockey stick graph. No other search provider has that sort of growth. It's not just you that's tired of poor search results from Google.

It's going to need to sustain that growth for a decade to be of any reasonable size. Google gets approximately the same number of search queries per day as DDG has in its entire lifetime (~11 years).

Edit: The problem in sustaining this growth isn't just marketing either. With increased traffic come increased server, maintenance, and engineering costs which may not be possible to support with untargeted ads as advertisers won't pay big money to show ads that have poor conversions.

I'm curious how untargetted they are - if I'm searching for python, how untargetted is a python book ad? I'd be more inclined to purchase that rather than a remarketing adroll targetted ad that's just spewing me the same item that I purchased 30 minutes ago

Sounds interesting. Got a link for that? And I’m saying that as a DDG user.

The dumb thing is that you can get the original search, but it’s buried in the advanced search as “verbatim” results.

Why would I not want verbatim results?

You, I, and most people posting here probably already know how to phrase searches with exactly the terms that are relevant. Most people in the world probably don't. I too dislike how Google performs worse for my queries now than it used to.

But I look at my non-technical relatives using Google and it's now magical how relevant the results are for vague queries regarding common information. Making precise queries for technical information work worse while vague queries for commonly referenced information work better is probably the right trade-off for a business that wants to make money. As much as I loath it for my own use cases.