Wow, glad I’m not the only one who had that impression. I have been using Brave Search for about half a year now and rarely had any problems finding what I was looking for, then eventually I started getting mostly older results, sometimes not even on topic.
Brave Search on all my personal devices, even though I’m getting worse results than up to a few months ago, so as much as it pains to admit it I sometimes use Google as a fallback (and the last time I actually used Google as my main search engine was back in 2012!). I probably should use metasearch engines more, though, but have been procrastinating learning how to effectively use them for a while now.
Aside from that, I have about a dozen sites saved with search keywords on Firefox (four of them are Wikipedia in different languages, though) that I use all the time.