Comment by rurp

I totally agree with the consensus here that Google search result quality has declined dramatically, although I think it's been happening for at least 5 years rather than 6-12 months. Two alternates have helped me replace Google.

DuckDuckGo has been mentioned by many others but I'll add my voice as well. It does a much better job at respecting quotes than Google (though not always!). It's very rare these days that I strike out on a search with DDG and have any luck with Google, though it does happen on rare occasions.

The other site is SymbolHound. This is great for programming queries since it actually search symbols verbatim! I found out about it when trying to debug a complicated makefile at a new job, while not being very good at makefiles. Ever tried searching Google for some unfamiliar syntax from a makefile? Hahaha, it doesn't even try to give matching results; it's totally useless.

I miss the old days but these two alternatives, plus falling back to Google, or at least StartPage with `!sp`, still works pretty well.