When I first started using DDG I would use the bang to get me back into google very often. Now whenever I use a browser or device (mis)configured to use google I feel like a guy who accidentally launched and tried to use IE8.
The fact that they're putting forum results ahead of web seems like they're just throwing in the towel on having useful web results that aren't just searching thing+reddit/stackoverflow.
At this point I'm just using Brave (the only privacy search engine that indexes the web as apposed to just proxying results from another service) and fall back to Bing on the occasion I can't get results there.
Google's web results seem so bad that I don't even go to them anymore if the privacy search engine doesn't have good results. I go to gasp Bing.