I'll throw in my recommendation for Kagi! Happily paying user. Perhaps my best recommendation is when I am having trouble finding something and tag !g onto my term to use Google instead (a reflex from using DuckDuckGo), Kagi will happily take me to Google where the results are, every time I've done it, much worse.

Kagi is exactly what I want my search engine to be, and feels like what Google used to be, to me.

I second this wholeheartedly. At first I was skeptical to get a subscription but to be liberated from the big G AND have excellent search is just worth every penny.

Dan Luu tested Kagi and found it no better than alternatives, but that it has the most inexplicably diehard users out of all the major options out there:

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/

That's pretty interesting - I'm able to replicate his results, even though they don't match my own experience.

I think it might be because I search for different stuff - for more technical subjects, I get better results. (A tiny example - searching "python dict" gives my python.org as the #1 result on Kagi, but the #1 result on Google is w3schools and python.org is #2)

It somehow feels like our society is crumbling under its own noise.

That's what TFA actually says in the body; the problem is general, none of the major search vendors have a "magic bullet" to cut through the noise right now. Leave it to the Register to headline it with one instance (the most popular one) for clickbait purposes.

Except, the major search vendors are the biggest problem. They sell the majority of the good search result spots as ads. They add more noise than anyone.