I'm not sure what has changed but I've experienced of late DDG participating in a similar style of result padding/query ignoring which has been publicly brought

I'm not sure what has changed but I've experienced of late DDG participating in a similar style of result padding/query ignoring which has been publicly brought up in Reddit feedback (and I've certainly complained about using their own feedback form). Seemingly arbitrarily even double quoted strings I've observed being ignored which is not how it was even six months ago. I still continue to use it though since as some here have already mentioned Google's results because worse a few years ago and DDG was lean and good enough to switch. I do hope they'd consider more such feedback.