I’ve been using DDG since they started. But still often use !g.

But I think the AI overviews in DDG and even Google have helped a lot.

AI has helped search tremendously. I only search for things that should have exact answers.

What I found was that when I first started using DDG, using !g to take me to Google would get good results. But over time, it stopped working. I'm not totally sure if it's because Google's profile on me timed out and it's not getting enough searches or because Google search quality has gone down. Now, several years into using DDG as primary, when I can't find it at DDG, I expect I won't find it at Google either... but they do give me different bad results.

Yeah, same queries. Results are (mostly) much better with Google. It's honestly disappointing because I'd love to be able to ditch Google as a search engine but, whilst it's not without its flaws, it's still much better than the alternatives[0].

[0] I'm deliberately avoiding talking about LLMs here: I mean specifically in cases where what I want to do is execute a web search - often because I'm dissatisfied with, or suspicious of, something an LLM has told me.