In my opinion, Google stopped being a "search engine" roughly 10 years ago. These days I'd call it a "recommendation engine" and it seems to primarily work by giving you results that people similar to your profile (according to the tracking surveillance data they have) have clicked with keywords similar to your query.

Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.

That said, I regularly do feel creeped out by the "search results" and the advertising they present to me. Sometimes the results are pretty useless too, I was once presented with a page of results where the 7 of the top-10 were written by myself (HN comments, etc) when I was searching for the docs of an obscure GCC feature I've discussed in the web often.

I don't know if there's anything that can be done to "fix" this. I generally try to navigate directly to an url I know or e.g. do a search on Wikipedia (Firefox + Vimperator make using many search engines on the address bar easy, unlike Google Chrome where the address bar UX seems to be designed to maximize Google searches and advertising).

With the gradually worsening signal-to-noise ratio, the web is getting less and less useful to me every day.

> Not that I necessarily blame them, all the SEO and blogspam crap made searching the web with something similar to pagerank and impossibility a long time ago. I think the eulogy was served by the "miserable failure" thing when GWB was elected (it was called a "Google bomb" in the media). That and all the low-effort wikipedia copies with their advertising made it impossible.

They use to fight the spam, though, and you could still find obscure-but-relevant sites. Not 99% of searches are, at best, a few top results from the same handful of sites that always seem to top the results, then a sea of spam. They seem to have just given up and ranked hard toward the top traffic sites and let the spam sites simply have the entire middle of the search rankings, starting around '08 or so. If you manage to search for something that's not on the couple hundred top sites, you end up with nothing but spam.

Do you need the results to be personified? I use DDG / startpage to avoid it.

Maybe it's the limited audience of DDG, but I find the results often look as personalized as google.

I agree. Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web. There are some hacky solutions that emulate that feature but it is not as good. I was hoping Bing might pick up on it and introduce similar features, but it looks like their ad sponsors are just not happy with people having instant access to uncensored and unmoderated product discussions and reviews.

"Google's removal of the discussions filter was a big blow to the openness of the web"

This!

With that filter I could name a product and find common people talking about it, now all I find is companies selling the product. This is getting even worse when searching political topics because from mixed people discussing the topic I now find only news sites or biased sources promoting their point.

You can use the query below (or something similar) to narrow results to include keywords found in popular discussion boards (modify it to suit your needs):

"dell latitude" inurl:comments|question|forum|viewthread|showthread|viewtopic|showtopic|"index.php?topic" | intext:"answer"|"reading this topic"|"next thread"|"next topic"|"send private message"|"reply"

Clever trick. Thanks!