[dredmorbius]

The problem is generally typical of online content as a whole given SEO gaming and commercialisation. DDG's bang searches and the ability to fluidly target searches to specific sites with less typing and fewer hops is a key differentiator.

The most relevant quality content tends to come from published rather than online sources, or by going direct to source.

The Web has been a mistake.

That said, Google's SERP page content, layout, tracking, and advertising all effectively drop relevance by a tremendous amount --- I've got to consciously filter out Google's own crap on top of the irrelevant web results returned.

DDG's cleaner presentation increases effective quality by a subjectively-assessed factor of 2--10.

Date-bounded search remains one of the very few reasons to favour GWS for a specific search, though even that is highly unreliable. Often what I want is a searchable archive from a given period, not a guestimate of a date-ranged search over the live Web.

Even in Google Books, date-ranged search results very often fail to return content from the requested period.

[_nalply]

> The Web has been a mistake.

In hindsight, what would have been better?

[dredmorbius]

That's a good question. I'm not sure I have a good answer.

I'm also not sure that djin can be rebottled. The history of media advances has been that they tend to progress and proceed, and human culture changes around them, they do rather less adapting to human culture.

(I've become aware in the past five years or so of the study of media and its impacts on society as a whole. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change only hints at the full breadth, but is one of the major works on the topic. She draws heavily on Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (literally: we live in the universe Johannes Gutenberg created), and there are numerous others who explore this, notably Adam Curtis and Neil Postman. Again, the Web, algorithmic social media, and mobile computing each bring their own twist. Again, this isn't the first time media's transformed society. I'd argue that every advance, from speech on up, has. The changes can be tremendous and catastrophic --- to the previously existing order --- as with the printing press and the Reformation and Hundred Years War.)

One useful approach is to look at each of what were touted as the Web's strengths, and consider them from the perspective of "what could possibly go wrong". Several principles of the sociologist Robert K. Merton are helpful here: overt vs. covert functions and phenomena, unintended consequences, and possibly self-fullfilling prophecies.

It's not clear to me what boundaries can be established for the Web, or what the consequences of a failure to establish those might be. Either case the future appears bleak.