I ask because I've been doing a lot of research the last few weeks and Google search has really let me down. I've been finding better results on DuckDuckGo and Bing. Is this a recent thing with Google or am I out of the loop? Any other search recommendations?
Google is mostly ads and robots now, I use it mostly for typing website names, not for actually searching things.
For searching things I'm testing kagi (http://www.kagi.com) which is not free, but not being ad-driven is an interesting concept for me.
This looks like a very interesting option but the pricing seems bananas. Early adoption and spreading the word would be driven by power users who are easily above 1,000 searches per month....and 25$ per month is a lot just for search.