For example, you could set a Google alert for, say, "embedded linux" and get a wide variety of good results. Now if you set the same alert, you mostly get spam results (many of which have been removed from the index by the time you click on them), and a surprisingly small amount of results overall even though a general query should give large numbers of results. The non-spam results you get are always commercial, no blog posts, mailing lists, etc.
I refer to Google Alerts as an example, but searching manually on Google gives the same impression. This makes Google mostly useless for finding actual information on a general search query, as opposed to advertisements and websites that function as advertisements.
Are there any search engines which are as good as "old Google" for actually finding recently-published _information_ when given a general search query? I mean blog posts, mailing list posts, and the like, not the Wikipedia article for the query.
I've tried DDG, Qwant and Bing and they don't seem to be improvements.
The real problem with search engines is the fact that so many websites have hacked SEO that there is no meritocracy left. Results are not sorted based on relevance or quality but by SEO experts' efforts at making the search results favor themselves. I can possibly not find anything deep enough about any topic by searching on Google anymore. It's just surface-level knowledge that I get from competing websites who just want to make money off pageviews.
It kills my curiosity and intent with fake knowledge and bad experience. I need something better.
However, it will be interesting to figure the heuristics to deliver better quality search results today. When Google started, it had a breakthrough algorithm - to rank page results based on number of pages linking to it. Which is completely meritocratic as long as people don't game for higher rankings.
A new breakthrough heuristic today will look something totally different, just as meritocratic and possibly resistant to gaming.