Ask HN: Search engines as good as “old Google” for finding information?
For example, you could set a Google alert for, say, "embedded linux" and get a wide variety of good results. Now if you set the same alert, you mostly get spam results (many of which have been removed from the index by the time you click on them), and a surprisingly small amount of results overall even though a general query should give large numbers of results. The non-spam results you get are always commercial, no blog posts, mailing lists, etc.
I refer to Google Alerts as an example, but searching manually on Google gives the same impression. This makes Google mostly useless for finding actual information on a general search query, as opposed to advertisements and websites that function as advertisements.
Are there any search engines which are as good as "old Google" for actually finding recently-published _information_ when given a general search query? I mean blog posts, mailing list posts, and the like, not the Wikipedia article for the query.
I've tried DDG, Qwant and Bing and they don't seem to be improvements.