Even the basic - operator so rarely works as intended in any search bar anymore. I used to be able to ferret out anything from mountains of results that way. Now it just ignores the operator.

The top search results from Google always being reddit links is a fairly recent phenomenon(I would say in the last year or so?), in no small part due to Google's targeted advertisements and SEO ruining the Internet, and LLMs has made blogspam much easier than ever before.

Despite its multiple flaws(the biggest one would have to be the inability to search for comments), reddit is one of the only places on the English speaking Internet where you can find genuine, relatively high quality dialogue between real people, good or bad, without any paywalls, which is also why I think reddit has always had an disproportionate influence on Internet discourse relative to its size.

I would say if reddit was competent, they would be trying to foster this aspect of its community that would take the function from Google and make it the best place to search for answer to everything, because in the end, all search on the Internet boils down to finding real people to willingly help other people in public, and there is no better marketing than genuine word-of-mouth. But, reddit seemed to be keen on rereading the steps to what ruined Google in the first place, the priority of targeted advertisment over people.

God it is so annoying how bloated Google feels these days - it's becoming more and more frequent for me just to use Bing because it actually gives me what I'm asking for rather than burying it in everything "similar" to it

SEO is what is killing Google. Companies designing shit websites designed to highjack search results is a huge issue.

Is putting "reddit" after everything using Google competently?

Google is absolute garbage now. Nothing but paid results.

I keep reading this, but Google still limits itself to your search terms 100% if you put them in quotation marks separately.
And you can exclude specific terms completely with a minus and quotation marks.

"searchterm1" "searchterm2" -"excluderesultswiththisterm"  

If you want results containing just one of your terms, put OR between them.

I haven't found another (free) search engine that respects these limits completely.
If your results still suck using this trick, it's because the internet as a whole sucks a lot more now. Forums are dead, blog posts are written by AI and heavily optimized to push them up in the search results, and all interesting info written by humans is in chat apps now.

Didn't really feel this way until last night

Neighbors dog got out and attacked some sheep, apparently they were getting flamed online for it

Could not for the fucking life of me find the Facebook posts about it even after logging in.

I DID find that my neighbor raped someone under 16 10 years ago, though, so thanks Google?

I switched to Kagi. Sure I've to pay acouple of bucks, but I realized my time is worth more than trying to find stuff while trying not to fall into the seo rabbit hole or Pinterest hellscape.

You used to be able to use google to skim free music from peoples unprotected online storage. But thats not a thing anymore both because google is worthless as a search engine, and because companies and scam artists figured out how to appear as these directories in the lists.

In days of old, when men were bold, and condoms weren't invented; they'd put a sock, upon their cock, and babies were prevented.

I find duckduckgo works pretty well. Use to I'd have to swap between it and Google depending on what I was looking for, but now I haven't had to swap in so long, that when I am forced to use Google at work, I actually get irritated with it because all the answers are buried under a mountain of ads.

I had been using Duckduckgo but I've been dissatisfied with tweaking the results. For instance, turning off the localization in the settings did not remove (commercial) results in my native language even when searching keywords in english.

I switched to SearxNG; I found a local instance. Very satisfied for the moment, I recommend testing it!

I switched to Kagi for everyday usage, yandex for piracy and Google Maps for finding places on the map. There really is no one option.

Every time people say that google search results "just don't work anymore" I can almost never get anyone to share a specific example of a search not working on their end. The few times people did give a specific example, google gave me exactly the result they claimed it wouldn't give, and on the first try. I genuinely don't experience this grand breakdown of google everyone else claims to be struggling against.

There are genuine issues (like ai images overtaking specific search results), but overwhelmingly google finds me what I'm looking for even when I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for. The few times it falls short, I try duckduckgo like everyone recommends, but the results are always worse.

I can't possibly be the only one whose search results still work great.

I use Duckduckgo for the vast majority of my searches but when I need to find something too specific I've lately been using Bing Chat. Aside from any privacy concerns I find it works surprisingly well.

Google's gotten worse, but some people are still asking it questions in natural language and have absolutely no idea how quotes work.