Same for me... I think maybe part of it is that people have forgotten (or never knew) how to choose good search terms, and Google has worked hard on giving good

Same for me... I think maybe part of it is that people have forgotten (or never knew) how to choose good search terms, and Google has worked hard on giving good-for-most-people or good-for-your-profile-bubble search results for terribly-constructed search terms, while the others haven't. I've long had the habit of constructing search terms that are minimal but distinct, since I had to do a lot of searching on less-DWIM systems like library catalogs and journal indices dating back to the 90s, and this seems to serve me well with searching DDG. I expect Google simply doesn't care about your actual search terms very much, and gives you stuff matching some kind of linguistic model of your search; what it thinks you want to search for, rather than what you ask for. That would account for it giving worse results on a well-constructed query.