I very rarely use Google Web Search.
Poor relevance and ubiquitous tracking is a key condern. But the ad-spamming is also tremendously out of hand.
I'd switched to Google from AltaVista in 1999. I ditched GWS effectively by 2013.
Yes, I'll still occasionally run a "!g" bang search. And there are Google services I find genuinely useful --- Google Books and Ngram Viewer most especially.
But the bloom hasn't been anywhere near that rose for a long, long, long, long time.
The most relevant quality content tends to come from published rather than online sources, or by going direct to source.
The Web has been a mistake.
That said, Google's SERP page content, layout, tracking, and advertising all effectively drop relevance by a tremendous amount --- I've got to consciously filter out Google's own crap on top of the irrelevant web results returned.
DDG's cleaner presentation increases effective quality by a subjectively-assessed factor of 2--10.
Date-bounded search remains one of the very few reasons to favour GWS for a specific search, though even that is highly unreliable. Often what I want is a searchable archive from a given period, not a guestimate of a date-ranged search over the live Web.
Even in Google Books, date-ranged search results very often fail to return content from the requested period.
In hindsight, what would have been better?
I'm also not sure that djin can be rebottled. The history of media advances has been that they tend to progress and proceed, and human culture changes around them, they do rather less adapting to human culture.
(I've become aware in the past five years or so of the study of media and its impacts on society as a whole. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change only hints at the full breadth, but is one of the major works on the topic. She draws heavily on Marshall McLuhan's The Gutenberg Galaxy (literally: we live in the universe Johannes Gutenberg created), and there are numerous others who explore this, notably Adam Curtis and Neil Postman. Again, the Web, algorithmic social media, and mobile computing each bring their own twist. Again, this isn't the first time media's transformed society. I'd argue that every advance, from speech on up, has. The changes can be tremendous and catastrophic --- to the previously existing order --- as with the printing press and the Reformation and Hundred Years War.)
One useful approach is to look at each of what were touted as the Web's strengths, and consider them from the perspective of "what could possibly go wrong". Several principles of the sociologist Robert K. Merton are helpful here: overt vs. covert functions and phenomena, unintended consequences, and possibly self-fullfilling prophecies.
It's not clear to me what boundaries can be established for the Web, or what the consequences of a failure to establish those might be. Either case the future appears bleak.
Trying to find information given only fuzzy details almost never produce relevant links; anything remotely commercial, like trying to find a product reviews, film to watch, a store nearby, etc. produces tons of synthetic websites full of ads that magically match my query; specific technical information can result in low-effort blogspam or total rip-offs from other websites (stackexchange answers, other blogs, etc.); and the list goes on.
It seems to me the only actually interesting material is now found in forums, message boards, wikis and other kind of websites where users generate the content. Unfortunately searching these is far from handy because they aren't always indexed or have archaic interfaces or require a login. I think search engines in general, either by prioritising revenue or being tricked by spammers and CEO, are now blind to the real information contained in the web. I wish for a search engine that would only index a curated list of genuine websites based on a topic, but I don't think we'll ever have one because it's not profitable.
This I find impossible to believe. So you basically don't get any useful results for 80-90% of your searches? I wish you could give some examples.
1. There's a shell (program) which feature a built-in file manager inspider by ranger, I forgot its name: try to find it. Answer: [1]
2. There's a particular gas that can (temporarily) kill a smartphone, but you forgot which. Find the article about this. Answer: [2]
3. There's a blog post (well-known if you're into networking) that argues IPv6 was meant to replace MAC addresses. Answer: [3]
[1]: https://elv.sh/
[2]: https://www.ifixit.com/News/11986/iphones-are-allergic-to-he...
2. "(this) gas causes smartphones to temporarily deactivate" second result
3 "blog post ipv6 was supposed to replace MAC adresses" 3rd result
In some cases some slight change in the wording changes the ranking drastically. However, I am not sure "The old good google" would find these at all honestly.
This is insane:
Interestingly, I tried the same on DuckDuckGo and it seemed almost identical: some inlined ads, shopping results, have to scroll down to find actual search results. (main difference: embedded non-ad results like wikipedia and news).
Occasionally Google is still better. Just today, I was looking for old financial data on Synoptics (late 80s). Google has books & journals from back then; DDG does not.
At one time, this was the highest-priced ad in Google (idk if it still is), because personal injury lawyers were desperate to get clients.
TLDR: 2 ads, the rest organic.
Top-2 were ads, a maps widget, organic result, people also ask, 4 organic results, people also search for, images, 4 organic, 1 ad.
They were also in blue or yellow (I forget which, but one was WAY more lucrative than the other!) so it was very easy for the user to distinguish an ad from a search result.
I just did the canonical $$$ search "flowers" on my Macbook. The entire first page was ads and they are not colored anymore (although they do say "Ad"). There is also a Maps snippet which shows where I can buy flowers.
What happened? Well, I can guess: they did experiments, and not coloring the ads produced more revenue. I know from talking to ordinary users that they often say proudly "I never click on ads!" Now they do.