Honestly I was searching for something the other day and between displaying an excessive number of YouTube links (was not in a position to watch a video) and the adverts it was less useful that Yahoo! Circa 2006.
I have long since switched to Kagi and I am a happy paying customer.
I can adjust my results, block or prioritize, but I rarely do that.
What I sometimes do however is I write a bug report whenever bad results sneak in. In a matter of hours a human looks at the results, verifies or ask follow up questions and in a few days or max < 1month a fix is out.
No more having to deal with a search engine that ignores both doublequotes and the verbatim operator (that is both Google and DDG and Bing).
Actually, the last few months before I got access to Kagi I used (and paid for) search.marginalia.nu . It was actually and honestly better for certain queries, especially things like arcane git knowledge or (I think) the nerdier parts of history.
