I went looking for the reason why searches weren't filtering properly. So I'm not sure what's going on but filtering by site only (which seems to be the only option left) doesn't help at all.

It looks like it never worked and the docs were wrong or out of date.

How few people were using duckduckgo with these filters for it not to be noticed until now?

Stranger still that the author noticed the change to the docs but not that it didn't work previously

I've never had problems adding operators until recently. I couldn't say when the change happened but I've been successfully using them since I moved to duckgo many years ago. I've been increasingly frustrated with duckgo and finally decided to find out what was going on and found this page.

In long search routines or deep research I often use quotes to find pages with specific language.

DDG has been my default engine for years now, but by the time I am searching at this level I often have added a !g along the way and am working in Google at that point.

Frankly, these changes don’t alarm me much because I am presuming most Q&A I’m going to be doing going forward will be in chatgpt or a similar service.

In the last few weeks, I’ve taken more and more questions, sometimes spanning a wide but related context to chat gpt.

There are no keyword-stuffed greyhat websites and long serps to dig through with varying formats, styles and recency.

It is just information. And while I am keenly aware chatgpt will spit back complete BS, I have found this problem is not bigger than the problems I face for information seeking via DDG or Google.

I noticed it (only knew of site filter). But could not understand why it worked the way it did. In the end I used it seldom.

The other filters are cool.