First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
In the case of google they purposely made it worse so that people spent more time on their site rather than other sites. This means they see more ads from google as opposed to ads on another website. They’ve just doubled down on this with AI summaries, too. Now they just blatantly take content from websites so you don’t have to go to the website that made it at all.
I agree with the summaries part. It does reduce the amount of traffic for websites.
I am not sure if it was intentional to make the search bad. Search was getting worse even before AI. And why would you make your customers consider another product?
I’m not enough of an expert to explain it better, but I remember reading about a guy who came on board with google, and took over search. He had an initiative to keep people on google longer. That’s my memory of it at least.
Oh