Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to most searches just to find semi-relevant content.
But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.
Right, adding "discussion", "forum" and even "reddit" to the search term increases quality dramatically. Also, Google is still great to search websites. I gave up on Stackoverflow's own search but add "site:stackoverflow.com" to my searches on google.
BTW, maybe someone wants to create a very simple webpage with a search mask that allows adding a few (customizable) terms and options and simply forwards that to Google's search when pressing enter.
I've started using uBlockList to block those sites and it does clean it up quite a bit. I assume those sites also work for some, but they're usually of low quality to me so I block them.
The second type of searches you describe seem to be better so far, but I've stumbled upon a bunch of obviously generated garbage recently. So not sure how long it'll hold.
I've tried things like DDG, YaCy, Bing and others, but often Google is just significantly better (but not necessarily good).
Google search for topics I'm unfamiliar with/wanting to learn about all lead to low quality, SEO-optimized to hell, clik-baity sites that are just riddled with ads. I have to add "reddit" to most searches just to find semi-relevant content.
But Google search for topics i'm super familiar with and just need a transactional search to look something up tend to be much better and generally the fastest way to accomplish a task.