[DoingIsLearning]

Perhaps controversial but I feel that we reached a saturation point with google's insistence on AI/natural language queries, where ddg is now giving me better search results than google for technical queries.

I think the only area where google is still able to outcompete other engines is searching for regional results in Google Shopping, apart from that SEO's are effectively eating google for breakfast.

[Tostino]

This is about my experience as well. Google has just about become useless for a ton of searches I had no problem with a few years ago.

The results take so much longer to find relevant results for just about anything

[BoxOfRain]

The only way Google could claw me back from DDG at this point is finding a way of eliminating the endless SEO spam and useless content mills from their results. It plagues both of them but at least DDG makes a point of being less insufferably nosy.

[gonzo41]

I bet they make more money by not fixing the problem.

Google could pretty easily drop scraping sites hard to the bottom of the list and prioritize fresh content. But it probably pays not to. So sadly you're not worth the effort.

I think DDG, being somewhat privacy focused has a more traditional index, whereas I strongly suspect google would be profiling the devices and people making queries based around time of day and device used to determine what type of results to favor. I actually get good results with google. But my technical queries are all done from my work laptop, so i expect there's a profiling, fingerprinitng going on on the google side that's shaping the index I use. or its magic.

Could you ever see yourself paying for search? How bad is google, what would you pay to change it?

[BoxOfRain]

I’d pay a subscription for searches that effectively removed cruft and heavily SEO’d listings. The classic example is looking for a recipe and getting an essay of SEO bullshit about how these cabbage leaves were grown by the Mad Monks of Machynlleth and remind the author of the their childhood frolicking around the depths of Mordor or whatever, but also things like stackoverflow or GitHub cut-and-pastes, blog spam, empty posts with nothing but trigger words to get the ranking higher, literally any link to things like Pinterest, and other annoyances which push actually useful results down the page.

Essentially I want a search engine that can differentiate results that exist to solve a problem I have and results which offer nothing and just want to divert my eyes from a problem to show me ads. That’s the difference, I don’t mind seeing ads next to things that are actually useful but many of Google’s results exist for no other reason but to show me ads and offer nothing useful. I’d happily pay £20 a month for a search engine that removes these pervasive annoyances reliably.