[kuhewa]

Google has been getting worse for the past few years, probably in the demands for making a standard product to suit the average person. But now the first page is full of results that exclude one of the search terms. And my strategy for years to find obscure results- of finding the oddest set of relevant terms to describe what I want to find to weed out commonplace results that share a couple terms — has stopped working almost entirely as Google's algo seems to have upweighted popularity considerably.

At this point I don't think it would be that hard to provide a useful alternative, especially with a business model where the customer is the searcher and not the advertiser. I'm not sure that all of those engineers are having an additive affect on the UI. Quite the contrary, I imagine many are working toward improving the experience for advertisers, who are the customers.

[deanc]

The quality of cadbury chocolate has been getting worse over the years since Kraft bought them out. I still buy it because it looks like the same product, kinda tastes like it, and ultimately will give me what I want. I don't disagree the quality of Google's results has gone down - but you are talking about changing user behaviour here and for the majority (not you and I) google still does what it needs.

[kuhewa]

It may even be improving for most people's needs. But I think it does present a scenario where a niche search engine with a different business model could be successful (and they probably wouldn't need 10k engineers to reach parity with Google's, at least in that niche). Maybe there isn't enough of mes though.

I haven't changed search engines, and Bing won hands down when I did the Bing/Google challenge they promoted in 2012. But it is getting 'bad enough' and I need search results for projects enough where I'd try the beta if invited and would probably stick with it if it's a good experience.

Hell, if they gave me a few more Scopus-like tools for more precise queries on a version of Google scholar, I'd be sold.