@danluu There is a lot of subjectivity and bias in the question, but I feel that there used to sometimes be useful results on the later pages even if there was nothing on the first page. This seems to have completely died.

To an extend it is probably that the web has gotten much worse, but I also have an easy time believing that google turned towards shit.

That said: I default to ddg and use !google if it doesn’t find things, which does work quite often, so at least in the cases in which ddg doesn’t work well, google is often decent.