It's hard to have a nuanced discussion about antitrust in the search market when this case is coming up 2 weeks before the election, and is actually about politically pressuring Google to give the party in power favorable treatment.
I usually end up adding "reddit" to my search terms to avoid crap results on both Google and DDG.
[1]I was very curious about my DDG vs !g searches and ended up making an extension for FF which measures just that - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ddg-stats/
This was certainly true 10 years ago, now I can't really tell the difference.
Honestly, I use search engines very little anymore.
SEO games make them almost useless to me. Certain well curated Reddit feeds, and sources where it looks like people give a toss is my preference. IRC, Slack, Discord communities are real time with a person, and probably “better” for discovery.
Let’s throw thousands of years of social evolution in the bin cause some billionaires can afford a lot of computers and exorbitant wages to have unscrupulous randos monopolize our exposure to the world. Ok
Same with FB, Twitter; I’m not finding a need to connect to everyone over their cat pic firehose, and the noise.
Edit: email works great for connecting to academics all over. Networking isn’t just through LinkedIn (which I also don’t use), and Upwork, or www at all. It’s just one of numerous conventions.
That's crazy. If Google has that power and will to wield it, they could wield it to remove that party from power, so the pressure is zero.