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 feels like I CANNOT find answers to questions anymore. Anything software or video game related is a living nightmare of blatantly wrong answers, irrelevant forum posts from 2011, or reddit posts with no comments/answers…