I gave up on Google over a decade ago - maybe two decades by now. Way back when I was using Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, Astalavista, and others. When Google came, it somehow beat them all at finding exactly what I was looking for.

Later they stopped searching for the exact words you typed, but it was okay because adding a plus in front of terms, or quotes around phrases, still let you search exact things. The combination of both systems was very powerful.

And then plus and quotes stopped working. Boolean operators stopped working. Their documentation still says they work, but they don’t.

Now, it seems like your input is used only as a general guideline to pick whatever popular search is closest to what it thinks you meant. Exact words you typed are often nowhere in the page, not even in the source.

I only search Google maps now, and occasionally Google translate.

So it must be the lack of ads, cookies, and AI generated content which makes Google suspicious of it

If your site isn't integrated with Google's Adsense infrastructure it is immediately at a disadvantage as Google won't scan your site anywhere near as often, and even when it does will put the results way below anything else that does. It's not that it finds your site suspicious, it is simply incentivized to really look hard at all the other sites paying for service.

I totally came to say this. Google has become designed to tarpit you into staying on the site longer. They no longer have the goal of giving you what you want quickly, they want you to see more ads.

Google makes $307/yr. per user. They are strongly motivated to tarpit us. If we want a clean search experience we need to be open to the idea of paying.

As an embedded systems dev that searches a lot of obscure stuff, I use Kagi and love it. Go try its free searches and see for yourself.

If you value your time and mental stability, please do yourself a favor and go see what clean, high quality search results look like on Kagi.

Google used to better than ddg like a year ago, now it's almost completely unusable for development and I find myself going back to ddg and actually finding what I want instead of some unrelated nonsense, ads and LLM output crap

It kinda depends what you're looking for. For technical stuff DDG is much better than Google (I don't know about kagi) but for local information Google still gives better results. Google seems to return what it thinks you want to search for and not what you actually tell it to so for exact searches it's always worse. If you're not sure what you're looking for Google can be better sometimes.

Kagi seems to surface great independent content and I've been loving it.

Google's been heading that way for a while, but goddamn this last month it's completely shat the bed.

My fave was the other night whrn a search for 'vast visual auditory sensory theatre' (literal artist and album) gave me top results of scholarly articles. Trying to google song lyrics gave me fucking screen issues. Utterly useless now.

Yandex gives some fun results, when was the last time you saw non-reddit forum posts pop up?

In contrast to my experience, all the other search engines stink. Google is the only good one. But I suggest using a frontend like Araa if you want privacy.