I have never ever been ale to find anything on Wikipedia with search, except if I know the title of the article I'm looking for. But as I often do want the information from Wikipedia, I just search <search term + wiki>, and it takes me straight to where I want to be, whether I'm using DDG or Google. Works so much better than !w
Lately I had to scroll down on Google search results a lot to find the relevant Wikipedia article, it often being somewhere below some irrelevant images, followed by a completely unasked for and irrelevant map (why in gods name would I care for where the nearest factory for a product is?), some random blogspam, and ads.
It used to be that you reliably had the Wikipedia article at the top of your results to provide context and basic information in case you didn't know what your search term means, you could expect it to be there if it exists. Now you have to waste mental energy hunting it down, which is a waste if there's no article at all.
I've lost faith in the ability of the Google approach.
Their results seem to have been turning to trash but then again, so has everyone else's.
There's a few explanations. Easiest one is me, I'm getting dumber with age or have changed my standards. Second one is they are all using similar approaches and SEO'ing has ruined search. Third is Google sets "the standard" and the other engines tweak themselves to follow the goog, regardless of results.
Reality is it's probably all 3 and a few more that I haven't thought of
