People realized they can make money online. As a result search engine rankings became very important. An industry of search engine optimization was created and raised the bar on what it takes to be at the top of search. This created an adversarial relationship between moneyed interests and real users. People often want boring content but somebody can make money from wasting your time, and so they can spend some of that money to ensure you will come to them. Not by directly paying whoever has your attention but by doing absolutely everything else. The good content everyone wants is simply not spending enough resources to be seen. That's what the game settled on. And I'm not sure how you can change these dynamics.
Ive started using duckduckgo not just for privacy reasons, but because its a better search engine for many things. This wasnt the case just years ago. The only reason ill use google is if Im shopping for something niche.
Related discussion on the article <i>Google Search is Dying</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719</a>
I switched to Neeva[1] a few weeks ago and haven't felt the need to use google since. It's not 2005 Google quality, but it's got a good UI and dark theme, and the results are pretty excellent (ad free, private).<p>[1] <a href="https://neeva.com/about" rel="nofollow">https://neeva.com/about</a>