And so, even if Google was the same thing it was back in 2010, there's no longer anything for "search" to find. And I hope you all downvote me to -50 and scream at me for being a retard with some snarky-assed abuse detailing how and why I am wrong. Because I don't want to be correct about this.
There was an era where there were a lot of completely free sites, because they were mostly academic or passion projects, both of which are subsidized by other means.
Then there were ads. Banner adds, Google's less obtrusive text ads, etc. There were a number of sites completely supported by ads. Including a lot of blogs.
And forums. Google+ managed to kill a lot of niche communities by offering them a much easier way to create a community and then killing it off.
Now forums have been replaced by Discord and Reddit. Deep project sites still exist but are rarer. Social media has consolidated. Most people don't have personal home pages. There's a bunch of stuff that's paywalled behind Patreon.
And all of that has been happening before anyone threw AI into the mix.
To be honest, DDG has always been far behind Google. It’s fine when I know my search result is going to be in the top 10 of any engine I use, but the moment I need to search for anything non obvious I don’t even bother with DDG any more.
DDG does seem marginally worse today than it was maybe 5 years ago. It falls off rapidly past the first few results. Now it even seems like it just starts mixing generic results from some popular adjacent keyword into the results and hopes we don’t notice as users that it stopped trying to search by page 2.