I mean, there has definitely been a noticeable and significant decline in the quality of search engine results, particularly on Google. It used to stand out at least a little bit from Bing (a search engine that went very hard into inserting ads into results early on), but they've essentially become indistinguishable. Aesthetics and connections with other platforms like Gmail and YouTube have become the only real reason to stay with one over the other.

[–] Ilandar@aussie.zone 7 points 5 months ago

Sure, I completely that it has declined significantly. I think the comments in this thread about it "sucking cock", being "just ads and SEO crap", or a "bloated, shit site" are hyperbole though. It is still the best search engine for most use-cases and queries, including finding answers to "how do I do X" type questions. I use DuckDuckGo (AKA Bing) but only because it gets close enough to Google's results to be a superior choice for me overall when I take into account its massive privacy advantages. In terms of results, there is still enough of a gap that I will occasionally need to rely on Google's results for particular queries. I actually used to use StartPage for this exact reason and only switched because it had issues with VPNs.