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.
It’s to push you into their AI stuff.
Gimp the search engine enough that you need to turn to AI to get a worse version than what you had before. Also a form of enshittification.