Their revenue goes up as their search degrades in quality.
Looks like a ripe opportunity for someone to take on the long tail search market. Duckduckgo seems poised to do this. Or perhaps some kids in a garage?
Otherwise, DDG is basically privacy chrome on top of Bing's results.
Are you 100% confident that this is the case? I personally have a completely different experience (their search results have gotten much better than they used to).
OTOH, if it's anything that has been SEO'd, I find google has gotten really bad. Last week I tried to google for what frying pan to buy, and everything I saw was a un-trustworthy ad.
Incidentally, it's the same for python: you google some very common thing like how to sort a list, the first few links are spam (but the docs are still high in the list usually). You google something obscure and usually get the relevant stack overflow first.
It seems like such an obvious next step, but google is too rich for its own good at this point and doesnt need to do anything.
From a user point of view, it's frustrating to look through the result, finding a list of ads, a commercial site, a few videos, a definition, a wikipedia link, a commercial site, and so on.
Instead, users have a pretty good idea of what kind of result they want. It would make it so much easier if the results are grouped together.
For example, a search engine could group results under individual tabs, separating results from user generated content sites, forums, commerce and commercial blogs, Wikipedia, content farms, and so on. Within each tab, there could be subtabs grouping results under each domain.
This would make searching the web a much less frustrating experience.