Is that actually true for you? I just tried it (logged out, and with adblock) and everything on the page seems relevant.

I've noticed this too, and frequently wonder why there aren't new and better search startups...

There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy.

People want better results but don't want to be tracked, and those things are in opposition to each other.

I think the only time Google still reliably gives better results than Duckduckgo is for non-English languges (which Qwant is good for), or when Google has something indexed and Bing/DDG does not.

But taking it as a given the Google's results are better, is that really because of lack of privacy, or just because of how Google has been pouring more money and talent into the problem longer than anyone else? Because I'm not convinced that personal data is particularly useful for generating search results. The example they always give is determining whether a search for "jaguar" means the cat or the car. But that always seemed silly to me, because most searches are going to give extra context to disambiguate ("jaguar habitat"), and even they don't, the user is smart enough to type "jaguar car" if they're not getting the right results. Further, Google doesn't actually know whether I'm more interested in cars or cats—it justs know that I'm a woman in college, so it guesses that I'm less interested in cars. Is that really so useful?

Does searching Google through Tor give noticeably worse results than searching google while logged in? I would be genuinely surprised if it did.

It took me something like 6 years, but I've gone over to DDG. Their results were poorer than Google's for me, so when I tried to switch I used to end up repeating and adding !g to every search. I don't think DDG got better, but Google results are bad enough that I think they're equal in quality now (for me). I don't login to Google, have tracking disabled, use uBlock and pihole; FF/Brave.

Well it's hard to tell objectively but it seems to have got worse without me changing the privacy settings. I guess that's their quid pro quo though.

I concur that both the UI/UX has gone down and the results themselves are feeling less reliable.

Have you tried viewing pages past the first page? Often times it's just filled with what looks like foreign hacker scam websites.

Yeah I guess it comes down to monetization strategy and how loyal/sympathetic the early adopters are.

It's funny because it's frequently mentioned how Google's tracking is what enables it to give such personalized search results, but often I question how effective that really is.

For instance I question if Google has some profile on me and shows results they _think_ I will want to see (e.g. news related), and thus leave out other results. If it works that way then I'm frequently seeing the same websites in my results and effectively being siloed and shielded from other results that I may find interesting.

Their new strategy of adding snippets for everything has truly gone insane. I search a query for "covid us deaths" today and had to scroll about 3 viewport lengths down to even see the first result.

What happened to just a plain list of blue links?

From a marketing perspective, I feel like DDG needs to change it's name or use a shortened alias. "Google" is an incredible word as it's easy to spell, remember, and it's short. Interestingly they own "duck.com"...

> There are, like DuckDuckGo. But the first complaint is usually "their results aren't as good as Google" and that's because Google in reality still gives better results because of their (lack of) privacy.

Alternative hypothesis: people only have had Google as reference for years, which means that Google represents "reality" to them. Anything that looks even slightly different is therefore worse.

I don't know about you, but 4 out of 5 times, when I research my ddg query, which did not produce a single relevant result on the first page, on Google, I get a good result as #1... Maybe I search google optimized.

Still though: This is not evidence for Google's search quality. I, too, feel, like the results got worse over the last years.

Also: Afaik, DDG uses bing under the hood, not what I would call "search startup" in the sense of revolutionizing search quality.

IME DuckDuckGo has all the same problems people are talking about here. I uses DDG as my primary search engine.

The results are correct for me. You just wanted to write a snarky comment. Did that make you feel better and gloat on Twitter about how you called Google a dumbass ?