[mhh__]

I'm in favour of competition for Google, but I can't be the only one who genuinely has no issue using Google? I see people complaining on HN quite a lot but genuinely the only thing I have - in years - struggled to find was the correct eBPF documentation but even then it only took a bit of nudging.

[uxp100]

I think there are types of searches it does very poorly on, but also different people have different expectations. In my experience, if something is a product for sale, the first several pages are always places to buy it, which is never what I’m looking for, I already have online shops I like and saw the item there, or am searching from inside a store. I want reviews, forum experience, or even just pictures. for example, actual pictures of a bike rack installed on a bike like mine, not just the manufacturer’s steel floating in a white void pics.

In addition, google has become very aggressive with disregarding words. So a search like (a fake example, not tried the search, not a real place) Jim’s tasty pizza Albuquerque 90s where I’m searching for where a restaurant I remember as a child was located, and has maybe 5 real results from a local history Wordpress blog 15 years ago and Facebook posts, Google will just drop everything specific and give you results for Albuquerque pizza, and then mainly show ads for national chains up top. So I need quotes in the search pretty much always.

[EricE]

If you go into the advanced search options you can tell Google to explicitly search on what you type. I use it so often for the reasons you point out (because nowadays in their infinite wisdom they will helpfully ignore quotes too) it occurs to me I should either find an extension or script to just have it enabled by default.

[52-6F-62]

I use Google and Google Maps plenty, though I'm one of the ones who might complain about their [lack of] privacy practices.

I use it for certain types of searches, and not others. I'm conscious of the fact that what I'm typing and searching, and subsequently clicking through will be piled on to the stack Google thinks is me. So it's usually tech searches, real estate/apartments, street view (property or exploring).

Health matters, personal matters, etc I tend to keep out of their search box.

Though more and more I tend to do a lot of cross-searching if privacy is not a concern.

[Nextgrid]

Google is fine for me (I use it as fallback when DDG fails) for technical results but for anything else it's pretty bad (recipes are a typical example). It's not just the fault of Google to be honest - the internet itself has turned into a cesspool - however Google would be in the best position to curate that and discourage that behavior by penalizing the offenders' ranking.