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.
That's a bit harsh but I agree that it is starting to fail to live up to the expectations I had with Google when it came out and destroyed Altavista in a spectacular shower of sparks.
Could I tender: "uBlacklist" as a stop gap, amongst others as we await Google being given a right old kicking?
Despite being a staunch Arch Linux user I have to deal with rather a lot of MS Windows related stuff. Being able to filter out that bloody awful Microsoft Social thing gets me closer to decent results. The majority of the next 10-100 results will be CnP clones of someone's blog but a human is able to get in reasonably quickly. I'm toying with blocking Stackoverflow and other cough slatwarts to see if results get better for me.
In my opinion: the www has hit a crossroads or perhaps a Spaghetti Junction or a Magic Roundabout for the last five years or so and continuing. However the exits are connected to the entrances on these road systems (take a look at them - they are real junctions. The MR is particularly terrifying but it works really well.)
I still won't use words like cesspool for this but I am increasingly losing my patience over the standard of results from Google. Those featured things (not the Ads - that's fine) at the top which add #blah_blah to the URL to colour search terms yellow is not working for me. The quality of the returns featured in a box are often rubbish too. It would be nice to be able to turn all that stuff off.
I understand that Google are trying to "be" the internet to try and keep the stock ticker pointing north but there seems to be a point when they have overreached themselves and I think that was passed several years ago. I also increasingly feel that Google thinks that it knows best and has removed many choices from their various UIs - that comes across as a bit arrogant.
Many years ago I left Altavista behind for Google. I will move again if I feel I have to. Of course that's not much in the grand scheme of things and I'll probably only take around 100,000 people with me but they have friends - still probably not a big deal.
I think we have loads of tools to play with but fundamentally there is a problem when you are fighting with your search engine to find stuff you want to find.
My laptop (Arch) still has Chromium as default with uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, uBlacklist and a few others running. I will be moving back to FF and running a sync server because I am that pissed off and able to do so. I'll also take a few others with me (between 2 and rather more)
When I say move back to FF, I'm talking about something like reverting a 10-15 years change.
I've always had FF available but it fell short back in the day for long enough for me to move to the Goggle thing. Now I think I'll go back.
Noone at G will lament their loss, I'm not even a rounding error. I'm sure that all is fine there.
I'm already here :-)
If 5 or so devs read it and change too and they start mentioning it then we have a fast chain reaction.
Just look at WhatsApp or even Microsoft or IBM: they seemed unstoppable but are very nuch just another alternative today.