At least they haven't used ChaosGPT for this.

Lord and master, hear my call! I have need of Thee! from the spirits that I called Sir, deliver me!

Goethe - The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Oh yes they learned. This is now a feature, not a bug. Google's slogan changed long ago.

If you believe Google is the most reliable, you can still use it in a private way via :

• Startpage

Startpage is a private search engine known for serving Google and Bing search results. One of Startpage's unique features is the Anonymous View, which puts forth efforts to standardize user activity to make it more difficult to be uniquely identified. The feature can be useful for hiding some network and browser properties.

https://www.startpage.com/

• SearxNG https://searxng.org/

SearXNG is an open-source, self-hostable, metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing any information itself.

There's plenty of public instances too https://searx.space/

• Whoogle https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search

Get Google search results, but without any ads, JavaScript, AMP links, cookies, or IP address tracking. Easily deployable in one click as a Docker app, and customizable with a single config file.

Couple of public instances too. Basically SearxNG with ONLY google as a source. https://github.com/benbusby/whoogle-search#public-instances

I've been happy with Kagi. It's for-pay but it's quality to me.

DDG queries can't really be written the same way you'd write one in Google if you're after effective results. It'll take some time to get used to it, tbh I was using DDG alongside Google until I fully switched.

I use mainly Andisearch, also has AI but relay on reliable sources (and one of the most privat search out there), Startpage and Whoogle use the old Google search engine, Mojeek also is fine, Groot search has a own search index, Etools a Suiss made Metasearch engine and some more. In the Vivaldi Forum you'll find the, maybe, most complete list of search engines you can try.

Nobody will tell you, but keep the best for the last I guess – Yandex. Russian, results reminiscent of old 2005 open internet, has no regard for US DMCA laws or western Atlantic Council censorship laws. Undisputed and incomparable for web results, reverse image search, videos, anything. Preferably use a VPN though to get more search results variety and for extra privacy. Its privacy is better than Google/Bing, but worse than DDG, but DDG has high censorship.

Kagi. It's better here.

Facebook (Lizard king) 🤝 Google (Lizard Queen) ?

Google hasn't understood the internet for a long time. They created an excellent search algorithm by treating the internet as a single information system that warranted analysis and indexing for convenient traversal.

These days that's not... Something they're interested in anymore. The goal is to collect user data for targeting advertising and resale. Their core product is still the search bar, sure, but that's just a hook to reel you in. They'll attach whatever buzzword to it it takes to keep it in the zeitgeist. "Ai" is hot right now so that's the buzzword.

I don't get the impression technical competency is something Google values anymore...

My theory is that Google wants to move towards vector symbolic representations for pages in search rather than page caching. It would make index storage and retrival orders of magnitude cheaper for them if they can design a scheme that works well.