Google search has gone significantly down in quality over the last year or so. Even just searching for simple things only seems to yield articles from the same 20 or so major websites, and it’s worse if you’re looking for niche items. DuckDuckGo on the other hand is starting to give relatively better and more diverse results these days.

Are you implying that Google search is any longer the only quality search engine? Honestly, I've been using DDG for years now and only less than 1% of my searches do I ever jump over to Google for.

In recent months I went from treating DuckDuckGo as some exotic search engine to using it many times a day. That is only because Google search is becoming useless, ad-ridden mess.

It has for me. Most of my searches are pretty generic and DDG does well enough. It has a nice dark theme and is fast and clean. And the !bangs are extremely useful. Saving a couple of seconds and a couple of clicks every search when I want to land up on the arch wiki or wikipedia adds up over time and I find it hard to go back to google now.

Some of Google's products e.g. Youtube are designed to be addictive, and in my experience addiction decreases one's quality of life. I still use the !sp operator on Duckduckgo to get proxied google results, you don't need a Google account for that.