I think he might be on to something. I know this is just more anecdata, but I've had a similar experience.

I've been using DuckDuckGo as my daily driver for years. It's generally OK. It sucks, but just barely works well enough to keep me going.

I started using Perplexity and ChatGPT for some searches that DDG was having trouble with, and it blew me away with the quality

Then I started going back and trying the same searches on Google, and I was surprised to find that it was just as good as the LLM-powered results after all. I don't know if phrasing things as questions was the key or just using Google instead of DDG did the trick, though