This echoes my experience as well. I switched to DDG some years back, in part because I could always compare with Google easily by appending !g. I still use !g (perhaps 1 in 50 searches), usually when I'm willing to trade worse presentation and degraded privacy for better long-tail results.
Try Kagi Search if you're willing to pay for a better search experience!
I've been using it for over a year, 100% of the time, and love it. Great results and awesome functionality like weighting certain sites, AI summarization, etc.
