I stubbornly clung to Google despite years of increasing problems out of habit and convenience. I just switched to DuckDuckGo a few weeks ago because I was finally fed up.
The turning point was trying to remember a song with only a few words in my head. I searched multiple variations of it, with and without quotes. The AI response (because I hadn’t turned it off) basically said, “nah mate, there aren’t any songs that say anything like that,” and search contained less than 10 total results, none of which were helpful.
Finally I remembered a few more words and searched again, and found the exact song. And it included, verbatim, a line I’d previously searched in quotes.
I also searched it on Kagi and didn’t get any results, sadly (I really love the concept of Kagi).
Since switching to DDG has been like going back 8 years in search quality—way better.
Or my recent experience: the search returns fewer than 10 results total. But change my search a tiny bit and suddenly I get the normal endless results, which literally contain the search terms I previously included in quotes.