if you're searching for something general, like, i dunno "dishwasher cleaner" or something, it spits out usable results.

but as soon as a query becomes technical in nature, like troubleshooting IT problems, it's a straight up nightmare.

the reason it's so bad at searching for anything very specific is their attempt to "figure out what you really mean":

and google does that by... ignoring what you typed and changing your search prompt behind the scenes without telling you and without any options to change it.

and putting it in quotes rarely improves searches anymore, only spits out more garbage.

point is: google is basically dead for any specific searches and only really works for searches that amount to "i want to buy thing. show me thing."

I tried using DDG but had even worse results than Google is having right now. I wish it was good, but my multi month trial of it was not impressive.

It was especially bad for programming. At least Google still finds what I need for that

Hard disagree with that, DDG searches are accurate about 90% of the time that I use it (which as a web dev is quite a lot) if they aren’t hitting Google with the same term rarely wields any better results.

It also doesn't allow you to actually exclude keywords. Which can be utterly infuriating if you're looking for a specific entry in a franchise or a lesser used definition of something.

DDG pays Bing to use their API. DDG makes money by placing ads in the results. They do it kind of circularly using Microsoft's ad system, but they are separate.