Maybe intentionally. If you know you won't find things, they know you are going to use their ai just to not have to type it elsewhere. I am strongly considering kagi
I tried DDG many times but I think they use Bing on the backend, and, well, Bing doesn't suck just because Microsoft gimps the front end. Bing sucks because enormous indexes are hard. Kagi pulls from multiple sources so gets fundamentally different results.
So the trick is to drop that nonsensical AI summarizer at the top.