But by now, DDG is simply better. An important use case for search for me is to copy and paste URLs for discussions etc. Google will still show original URLs when I hover over their links, but when I COPY them, I don't get the URL, but some redirect link through Google.
At best, those are ugly and confusing when pasted into text. At worst, for e.g. image URLs, naïve processing may not longer recognize them as images because the suffix is buried deep in the redirect link.
DDG gives original URLs, As Sir Timothy Wanted Them.
Additionally, for image search, I get the impression that yandex gives more relevant results, although I don't have hard data to back that up.
Google is doing that for a very long time. I use this extension to get rid of it:
Yahoo?
List of Web Directories, Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
EDIT: He used to say to me: "[WhateverMyNameIs]! Nobody is going to pay a penny per newspaper article or a nickel for a song!". And I'd say: "Jerry! Nobody is going to pay to advertise on your personal curated bookmark list!". Turns out that one of us was right. And it wasn't me.
DMOZ was a good idea, but the execution was biased because curated lists invite partiality. You might build something better only if you could mitigate this natural tendency.
Those are subject to the limitations of hierarchies [1]. They don't work well beyond a quite small data set. And for a directory curated by someone else, you would need it to be someone that organizes things in exactly the same way as you would. Tagging and faceting can help a bit with that in the early stages of growth, but ironically you ultimately need a way to search the contents of the hierarchy.
I wonder how much of the negative sentiment towards Google is partially motivated by subconscious dissatisfaction with their main product. I think I'm probably guilty of that.
Others have mentioned that the web environment has changed a lot and I've come to agree. PageRank style algorithms are probably pretty useless in an era of low effort reposts, aggregators, optimizing for clicks and a large SEO industry.
In addition, most of the user-generated content is now inside "walled gardens" like Facebook, Instagram and Reddit, and is either impossible to index, or much harder to quantify and rank than websites linking to each other.
There has to be something better out there, but it will be a difficult challenge.
Ironically, the thing I would appreciate most is a manually curated, Wikipedia inspired, hierarchical directory.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21515181