[staticassertion]

As a sort of related question, what do people use search engines for? I find that 99% of my searches fall under the "I know exactly what site I want to search" ie: docs websites, github, wikipedia, etc, which I can search trivially in my browser's url bar.

For the last 1%, I use duckduckgo, which almost always ends up just proxying me to one of those other sites.

Search feels very "solved" to me, I don't see the point in using Google.

[mojuba]

It's because you don't know what you don't know and living in the Google bubble isn't helping with discovering those things.

[staticassertion]

I'm not sure what you mean. I don't know all sorts of things. I watch a conference talk or I read a paper, and I start looking things up.

If it's a paper reference I search for the paper's ID/ title - Google won't do any better than DDG, this is a pinpoint search. If it's a term, like recently I was looking into Entity Resolution, I wikipedia it. I run into things I don't know constantly and my search engine has virtually nothing to do with how I discover new information.