First of all google went to shit, but duckduckgo has been disappointing me too.
I moved to searx and it was decent but confused me a bit and not always reliable.
But the single biggest problem on the internet for me… The yt search bar. My god I fucking hate it with a passion. It just doesn’t do what its supposed to, its not searching anything at all. Ive literally tried and written every word of the video title plus the channel name and it didnt show up bc I put onen word in the wrong spot.
Its not usable. 90% of the time I’m getting random Indian videos with nothing to do woth my search, shorts (which I blocked in revanced so thats fine now) and people also watch or recommended videos from my user profile.
Honestly, at this point Reddit’s search doesn’t even really feel worse than the competition. Its terrible at fuzzy searches, yes, but the fact that it has functioning search operators that it consistantly respects is so useful. Being able to search “(add OR insert OR update) AND (rest OR restful) NOT sql” is so useful.
Of course, a good fuzzy search would also be great, but no one offers that anymore, so…
when i want to search for specific things on reddits search bar, it kinda “hallucinate searches” totally unrelated to what you want.
Try using the title:() operator. For example, title:(warrior OR knight). It can also be combined with others, like title:(sale) OR flair:(offering). I’m sure theres also options for content and metadata, but I don’t know them off the top of my head.