It has gotten really terrible , some examples :
1. Site diversity is non existant . Nearly every term results same handful sites. Proof [0]
2. Actual blogs are not shown in serps . I have to use blogger and wordpress in search term to find blogs but it exculdes all the blogs that are not blogger or wordpress .
3. Way too much focus on reddit compared to all other forums. Its like both people and google both forgot forums other than reddit exist.
4. Too many non related articles .
5. Got too many seo optimized junk ? Just go to page ten or twenty . Turns out google now capped search results to a few hundred . And bing ? The pages become irrelevant at the later pages.
Workarounds I use :
1. Adding hackernews does improve my serp that are related to to tech .
2. limiting my search results to a old date/month improves the serp .
3. Marginalia [1] and kagi occasionally helps .
4. Sometimes I use absurdly long keywords .
5. Sometimes i use a search engine from here [2] to see if it gives better results or not which usually turn out to be not .
6. Yandex sometimes work but not always .
In short : The current search quality is terrible and finding smallweb ,forums and blogs are even more difficult .
[0] https://detailed.com/google-control/
[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/
[2] https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-...