To me the main way of determining search engine quality is whether or not it can find pages that I know exist because I've read them recently (they're still in my history) based on the terms that to me make sense for that page.
By that metric there are no good search engines at the moment and the older the pages the worse this effect gets. It's really nice to see Google do lots of 'moonshots' and interesting tech demos but I'd be far happier if they fixed search and kept their focus on that.
If a page doesn't show up in either Google or Bing for sensible queries then that page effectively ceases to exist. The perverse incentive that these companies have to avoid you going to a page with relevant results as long as you spend more time on pages with their advertising on it ensures that more and more content will end up missing in action.
I'd be happy to pay for a search engine that:
- actually really works
- also allows you to search past page 10
- has a working API with reasonable limits
Yup. Google has been pretty awful for the past, oh, 5-10 years or so. They used to be a high quality search engine, a way to index the depth of material on the internet. Now they are just a semantic front-end for the most popular content on the internet. Do you want to find something from wikipedia, youtube, medium, the new york times, amazon, etc? Google does great. Do you want to search for something that thousands of other people also search for routinely? Google does great. This role is also the easiest to monetize for google (through promoted links). But if you want to search for something highly technical or very specific, google is now terrible, in fact it's worse than it used to be 10 years ago.
I’m attributing the reason for this to the mass of mobile/social users who changed the search market. Most people from these groups search for naturally popular things like Saylor Twift [legs] or whatever it is in the trends right now. I wish we had unpopular search engines that suck at pop. I also miss directories – while not fully complete, they gave a good overview on technology sections and many more that you cannot just google since you don’t know it exists. Before the internet my family had a big encyclopedia collection that I as a kid occasionally opened/skimmed and read about something new. It is not possible with wikipedia and the internet since it is now overwhelming and has no good place to start anymore. Our average attention volume is so narrow (relative to amount of information) that it became a product. Also, I miss the days when you had to investigate a topic, make yourself fluent in it and enter ‘the club’ of highly interested people. Now anyone can google a shallow pop-info on anything and pretend to be educated in it in minutes. That degraded many good groups as a result.