The top-ranking HTML editor on Google is an SEO scam

Same story for various Wordpress plugins and widgety things that live in site footers.

Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.

Anecdotally DuckDuckGo seems to have fewer sponsored sites than Google. DDG also makes it easy to block low-quality sites because it adds a data-domain attribute to the root of every search result. I recently started this mini uBlock Origin filter list for that (suggestions welcome!):

    ! Hide low-quality results on DuckDuckGo
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.com"]
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.com"]
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="w3schools.in"]
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain$=".w3schools.in"]
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="download.cnet.com"]
    !! Stack Exchange mirrors
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="exceptionshub.com"]
    duckduckgo.com##[data-domain="intellipaat.com"]