I have mostly transitioned to Ecosia (which uses Bing) for most of my searches. I got sick of irrelevant results and half the screen covered by Google asking me to log in.

My primary search engine is rarely Big G. More often than not, if I can't find what I'm looking for by SERP 4 on DDG(Bing), I'll figure out what the missing keyword was, and edit the query. I've also been using Brave search some, but their connection to crypto bugs me enough that I don't want to rely on them.

If I really do need Google, I use Millionshort, with the full million excluded.

I use it as a fallback if I can't find anything (usually searching specific errors) but 90% of my searches are through brave.com now

It's a shame they're run by a shitty person because their products are actually really good.

Google has been on a steady downward trend for several years now, to the point where it's getting nearly unusable.

It still works relatively well in English, but have you tried searching in other languages?? It's hot garbage. Google does not know the difference between Japanese and Chinese even in 2023.

Not really.

I tend to use Brave search, since it is the default in by browser. Sometimes I don't get good results, and will go to another search engine. Google has become a bit unreliable though, since they started integrating these "ChatGPT"-style responses. These AI systems often seem to just make stuff up, and you really can't rely on the information at all.

This may be confirmation bias, but I was thinking much the same thing before seeing your post, over the same time frame (last few weeks/days). Could be people are getting better at manipulating Google's algorithm, could be something else. But I've stopped going to Google as my first choice, getting much better results with Duck Duck Go (which is Bing I think).

Test

i've been using ddg, searx and others for years, sometimes startpage when i really need g** restults

There have been less relevant results on google for a while. The same can be said for youtube as well.

I'm surprised to see that Brave Search isn't mentioned more. Is there a privacy reason behind it?
So far I'm happy with it. It is pretty annoying to switch a different image search provider though...

I haven't been using Google anyway since Bing got its redesign. It's just so much more useful now than Google.

I have found my results to be more repetitive, filled with sponsored content, and less relevant. As a lot of what I search for is within articles/research, having equity company products shilled at me during the process is frustrating. It’s been a lot worse lately.

I've been trying DuckDuckGo since I migrated to Waterfox recently. It seems more functional than when I last used it, some 6~12 months ago. And I've been noticing my searches are usually more successful on DDG than on Google too.

Switched to DuckDuckGo years ago. Using Google only occasionally. Recently I have been distancing myself from both, using a combination of search.brave.com (works at least as good as DDG) and SearXNG.

I’ve been trying a few different alternatives namely Qwant and Startpage. I find Qwant to be the quickest of those two and have been using it most often. Trying to get away from the google ecosystem as much as possible, searches are getting bogged down even with an adblocker.

I still use google a lot. It has a lot of features and gives me accurate results. i have started to use Bing because of Microsoft Rewards