Perhaps we are searching in different domains or have different expectations but I haven’t had the same experience. I use DDG as my primary search engine but very often I end up adding !g to get to results that are usable and it’s to the point where for a lot of things I !g straight from the start.

Haven't had the experience of things disappearing off of google?

Of things which were a top result a year ago but now show on page 20?

What domains are you searching on??? Google explicitly personalized your search results, which means it is intentionally presenting different results with every search.

Google might be your current best option, but that doesn't discredit the poster's view.

I've not experienced any of the things which you describe and I find personalization to be generally valuable. I also think its less personalized than many people believe it to be. (Disclaimer: I used to work at Google/Alphabet but not on Search).

I didn't say Google was the best for everyone all of the time, just for me most of the time. I just didn't agree that anyone that uses Google hasn't carefully evaluated the quality of the results: I intentionally made an alternative my default and, despite it being harder for me to use Google now, I still fall back to it more often than not.

Perhaps, in my case in some of these cases I remember wording / sentences explicitly that I can recite from memory, or failing that, I surely remember a string of keywords that will only appear in a handful of articles.

And like I said, it's not uncommon to find something on Google one day and have it just gone six months later.

Same! the google maps m! is just too good for me not to use DDG. (does Google have an equivalent?)

Yep, I've had this as my first bookmark on my toolbar for years:

> javascript:(function(){$('.js-search-input').val('!g '+$('.js-search-input').val());$('.js-search-form').submit();})()