this always baffles me. If my search terms return zero hits, THAT is helpful and meaningful to know, when they change my search to enable hits, that isn't helpful, because it 99% of the time will not have the information I want, and frequently I won't know that they are ignoring search term, so I'll click through to half a dozen hits before I discover what theyve done. I got to the point that as soo as I clicked a link, the first thing I'd do on the landing page was command-f, and search for the most specific term in my google query. If it wasn't found, I'd instantly hit the back button and do the next hit.
This really got to me about 6 months ago, so I changed all my default searches on all my browsers and mobile to DDG, and haven't looked back. I tried DDG ~5 years ago, and there was no way it could have replaced google for me then, but when I did it 6 months ago, it didn't seem any worse, maybe a little better.