Wholly agree on the state of searching. These days pretty much any important words in my technical queries are ignored, and the results end up with the same landing pages for the project I'm searching about mixed in with pop culture trash and autogenerated spam pages rather than anything relevant to the narrower query. It's not a library of knowledge, but a wall of noise.

I've tried eg Yandex and it's not much better, mostly just different (although they do return a good amount of results for things that Google's thought police have vanished). The unfortunate truth is that with the "internet" entering pop culture, pop culture has watered down the Internet.

I was thinking it would be interesting experiment to take adblock one step further and hack something up that retrieved all the Google results and filtered out everything with any advertising. It seems like I'd come across those hard-wrought dense-knowledge textual pages far quicker, since the author's motivation is to share knowledge.