Re: "so a majority of people do change search engines"
"I use DuckDuckGo for privacy but the results just aren't as good as Google"
I stopped using DDG and use Qwant instead: much better than anything.
For me Google gives mostly shitty answers: first are always YouTube videos or Amazon articles, or some commercial supplier, often actually concurrent of what I'm really looking for. Also, you have to know the search engine, know what sort of keywords to use to get your results. With DDG before, and Qwant now, I always get the first results I need when entering the keywords that matter. With Google, my keywords are superseded by who is paying more to be on top of the list: useless crap for most serious search.
It's been years that I don't use Google search. And never look back.