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Many of these articles/complaints don't compare Google Search to alternatives (Bing / DuckDuckGo / ...), so it's not clear whether web search itself is getting "worse" (in the ways mentioned), or whether the issues are with Google Search specifically.

(For example, the article proposes the explanation that "The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust", which is about the web itself, not specific to Google.)

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I try to use DuckDuckGo exclusively, but the results are often poor enough that I have to switch to Google.

Just to be clear, I totally agree with all the criticisms of Google here; it's also awful and I'll often end up just doing site: searches, which Google seems to be better at than DDG.

It feels a bit like the search engineers have lost the war with SEO.

Ditto. DDG is my default search engine with mixed results at best. I often begrudgingly revert back to Google.

I do that too. But recently I also started inserting !g before my searches hoping to get better results only to notice I am already on Google.

I started switching to !g when I had to finish a project in a hurry and I was using a framework I was unfamiliar with. By the end of the project I had just ditched DDG as my default and went back to Google.

Search for "Seven" on Google and Duck Duck Go. It's very telling. Most complaints in here apply to powerusers which won't be noticed by vast majority.

For me, Duckduckgo finds technical information that google doesn't and vise versa. I use both.

I use DuckDuckGo almost exclusively, and most of the criticisms directed at Google Search also apply to DDG.

I don't think the web can be indexed and searched in the way it has been done. I think it needs human curation.

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