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.
This is true, but it’s also not helped by the fact that the web itself has gotten worse. A lot of stuff that previously would have been on a crawlable page is now on an amorphous infinite scroll feed behind a login screen, or worse still a YouTube video.
And the crawlable pages have been poisoned with SEO so there’s often lots of keywords but almost no information.