Duck duck go is terrible. I give it a try frequently, and it is the default search provider on my phone, but most of the time I get useless results and have to either do it again with google or give up and try searching the history on my desktop for what I needed. I don't know why PLAIN TEXT SUBSTRING MATCHING is so flipping hard. Yes, I know spam exists, but I would prefer a dumb search to a smart but useless one.

Looking at my own webserver logs, I often wonder why ahrefs or majestic do not start a search engine effort. They crawl me as often as bing or google do, and could easily get a foothold with a "less is more" approach to search.

Haven't used GS in years. In many cases, substring-matching is a far superior search tool. Multiple reasons it might not be available (cycles for one), but it'd be great to have a second, 'advanced search' layer (like e.g. archive.org and worldcat have) available.

Agreed that DDG's 'helpful guesses about what you're looking for' generate about 50% bad results when you know EXACTLY what you want, and so you're stuck shaping your terms with pluses, quotes and minuses. Price to pay to avoid Google worth it to me.

You know what, you nailed it. I do not want helpful guesses from a machine. :) I liked them better when garbage in made garbage out and people knew not to trust the machine blindly.

Wow. I didn't notice it happening, but I've become previous-gen tech...

There's more to a search engine than crawling. Actually storing that data in a system that permits real-time searches based on arbitrary keywords is fairly expensive. Those services are only interested in creating a page link graph, which is a lot cheaper to operate.