My main focus isn’t on quality of results.
The real problem is, whenever I type a query that’s even the slightest bit out of the ordinary, I get no results. Google, Duckduckgo, Startpage, Searx, all of them.
It strains credibility that these advanced pieces of technology could not find anything among billions of websites, when in the past, less-advanced versions of these engines could find results for similar queries among smaller numbers of websites.
To reiterate: My problem is not with SEO, or spam, or AI-generated websites, or irrelevant results. My problem is getting no results much more frequently than in the past.
I haven’t noticed that myself. I’ve found that pretty much anything pulls up at least some results.
I note that you don’t give an example, and just thinking…if what you’re searching for is NSFW, most search engines that I’ve glanced at these days default to having some form of adult content filter on by default.
But other than that, I can’t think of a new filter that’s shown up. And I think that search engines are only indexing more content these days.
If your search is something that you don’t mind sharing an example of, would you mind doing so?