I can't echo this loud enough - I made great profit by out-ranking heavily established retail outlets for years with super spammy and terrible sites purely with correct on-page SEO and garbage 'keyword optimized' content.
I, as well, now have to append things to searches in order to get real answers. (Or start with a twitter search, depending on the topic)
Woah, thought I might be one of the few that did this. You articulated my reasoning behind it perfectly.
Five to ten years ago, the Wikipedia article for the molecule was always in the top three.
I do the same thing. I want real people's experiences and honest opinions.
Example: in the midst of my house renovation my Hisense TV remote has gone walkabout. After several months of having no idea where it is (I figured it would just turn up - I mean, it has to be in here somewhere, right?), I decided to order a replacement. Amazon is full of knock-offs, but turns out Hisense sell remotes directly.
So I type "Hisense" into DDG and it's the top result, but it's the Chinese site, and I can't figure out how to get to the UK site. The UK site isn't even on the first page of results either. I rerun the search with Google and the Hisense UK site is the top result, and I'm able to quickly find replacement remotes.
That's a shame because, as bad as Google has become, it's still better than other options. As an example of how bad Google really is, last night I tried searching for info on how to mount twin slot shelving uprights on an uneven wall - specifically a wall where the otherwise smooth plaster is less than perfectly vertical (there's an undulation reflecting imperfections in the underlying brickwork). The result? Just pages and pages of SEO spam/"content marketing" on the very basics of fitting twin slot shelving, all of which assumes that your walls are perfectly vertical across their entire surface, and none of which has any kind of troubleshooting hints and tips. I probably tried 10 different search query variants before giving up in disgust.
Google is outright terrible, and its much touted AI is laughably poor[1]. But DuckDuckGo is worse. I'm simply choosing the least bad option, which unfortunately isn't saying much.
[1] Or enragingly poor depending on your mood and perspective.
I also append forum (or site:forumname.com) if I'm looking for more in-depth review than reddit gives.
The search experience is genuinely bad now. Nothing organic shows up anymore. It's either heavily optimized cookie cutter content, or some big brand name cutting through the clutter on the strength of its domain authority alone.
I've taken to appending "reddit" to my queries just to know what actual people think about an issue