I don't know how many Google searches I did yesterday, but it feels like a lot.

It does has problems with certain queries beyond a certain depth, which I also get frustrated with, but I can go from having forgotten calculus to integrating by parts with the help of Google.

You literally can't go to page 2 anymore

It ignores what you ask and answers what it think/wants you see.

Previously you controlled search now you are lucky if a site is even in the index.

I mean, personally I think this is very likely true. My feeling is that it's the web itself which has gotten demonstrably worse. Diagnosing the reasons for that is a more interesting problem.

The only score that matters is the one in real life, in the game you choose to play. If it gets harder, you need to get better.

I think it’s a little tricky separating the two since Google has so much influence over the web. A lot of the parts of the web which have gotten worse were due to decisions they made to do things like cut ad revenue for normal organic content, declining to punish or even rewarding blackhat SEO, pushing AMP, shuttering Reader, etc. That sold a lot of ads at the time and people said it was needed to counter Facebook but it’s left them more vulnerable now.

Google's unwillingness to show any results older than Taylor Swift' last breakup song made me switch to DuckDuckGo.

It was a bit rough at first, but in time Duck turned out to be just as good as Google, and sometimes better for the sorts of thing I search for.

Then, about four or five months ago, something happened to Duck, and it's gotten significantly worse. Short lists of results. More results that are off-topic than on. In the last couple of weeks, for me it's as bad as Google was before.

I'll stick with Duck because it's not trying to harvest every morsel of my life to make a quick buck. But I wonder if anyone else has noticed a very quick and very significant change in quality with their DuckDuckGo results?

Anecdotally it seems they do more fuzzy match and adhere less to exact matches even when keywords or phrases are quoted.

It's been frustrating to see specificity of results decline.