It shouldn't be too hard to achieve what Google were good at before.
Their recent search results for me (last 6-12 months) have been so far removed from what I'm searching it felt like a meme.
Even after rephrasing things, more details, special quotations etc that everyone knows as the 'search tricks' the results are terrible.
I'm using Kagi for quite some time. It's invisible to me. I search, get 30ish high quality results per search, and I'm a happy camper. No ads, no seo grafting, nothing.
Moreover, I can block sites and customize my own search results. This feels good.
When I first started using Kagi, it felt like leaving a closed building and stepping out to open air.
One of the few software tools I care to pay for except Jetbrains.
Only in practice I almost never use filter or block features, because Kagi does out-of-the-box what we always wanted to do our selves in Google: block spam sites.
The ranking also seems to be better for some reason somehow.
The funny thing is it doesn't feel like a step forward, but rather like a step back to Google ca 2009 - 2012 somewhere.
I moved to DDG a couple of years ago, and initially, I found myself often using the `!g` switch, but I honestly can't recall the last time I needed to do that. Only when I'm shopping do I find the goog to be a slightly better tool for finding products sold by niche suppliers.
I honestly think google's monopoly on search at this time is 100% powered by momentum, there is almost no other reason to use it over something like DDG or hell, even Bing!
Basically exactly the same thing here. It used to be that google had the better results, but DDG got a little better and google a lot more shit, so here we are I'm pre-filtering what I look for.
Even after rephrasing things, more details, special quotations etc that everyone knows as the 'search tricks' the results are terrible.