Back in the day I used to do Mechanical Turk like 
work assessing search engine quality. There were very detailed guidelines about what made a search engine good, compiled into a like 250 page document Google had been curating and updating over the course of years.
One of the key concepts was the idea of a "vital" result for a user request. If a user had a specific request, the search engine had to deliver that content first. For example, simpson.com at the time was a malicious website. With this in mind, if the user searched for "simpson.com", the first result had to be simpson.com, even if the search engine is returning a malicious page. It's specifically what the user requested. We aren't supposed to question what the user wants. The results that followed after could provide suggestions of what else the user may be looking for, like the official Simpsons website.
I would love to see whatever shreds of this document is left at this point, and I'd love to know at what point the entire thing was thrown into the trash and rewritten. I assume somewhere around the year 2016 or 2020. I know this is nothing shocking to a lot of people, but it really does amaze me just how bad things have gotten. I've stuck to the major search engines because despite peoples bitching, for a long time they consistently outperformed the smaller competitors, but they are genuinely without hyperbole almost unusable now.
Example: I wanted to find the recent Tucker Carlson - Vladimir Putin interview. It's a newsworthy interview with a world leader and a current event. There is a very specific video I'm looking for, the published, official video of 
sitting down and asking 
questions.
Here is what google returns in a private window:
The very first piece of content - the "vital result" - is clickbait youtube cute twinkry from Time 
What are the keeraZIEST moments from the interview?!? 
The rest of the results are a cascade of editorialized garbage, opinionated news articles reporting on the requested content. God forbid a careless user actually be exposed to a primary source.
The closest result to what I'm looking for is about over 10 pieces of content deep - the transcript of the interview from Russia's state website. Likely this is an oversight.
Here is Bing:
There's been some meme going around that "no really guys, Bing is actually kinda good now believe it or not".
This is even more nonsense than Google. The most prominently featured content is, of course, more editorialized bullshit with the interview itself nowhere to be found. But also half of the content is just completely irrelevant crap I didn't ask for. Why is the entire right half of the page a massive infobox about Tucker and his books and quotes? Why am I seeing something about Game of Thrones?
Brave:
You get the point. More useless crap. It gets half a point for its AI accidentally revealing that tuckercarlson.com is where the interview is located, but this doesn't count. The actual search results are all garbage. Thanks Brave for showing me all the latest reddit discussions 
Yandex:
Was that really so fricking hard? Result #1 - the interview from Tucker Carlson. Past the interview are news articles and images - things of waning utility that other users may be interested in. But the vital result is at the top of the page. That's fricking it. This would have been the required order for the page on Google ten years ago.
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Every Yansex user should be jailed for threading democracy by looking at “”””primary sources””” (read: Russian disinformation) and being UnAmerican. I'm pretty sure our elite western liberal search engines now what they are doing, okay sweaty?
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It may be because tuckercarlson.com isn't a major site and google weighs youtube and large media sites differently.
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Tuckers interview with Putin is on YouTube too though; from Tucker Carlsons account no less not some repost from a rando:
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This a terrible excuse. The interview is no where to be found. It doesn't matter what domain the actual interview is hosted on, it should outrank everything else. If it doesn't, your “search engine” is trash.
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I was explaining a possible reason why.
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That's not an acceptable reason, that's just incompetence.
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Alex jones was right
Trans lives matter
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IT was posted on Twitter they could just link to that
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It's on Tuckers twitter account, which is where the interview actually streamed. No sign of it in search results tho. Twitter Too small?
https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1755734526678925682
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Yandex seems to be the only not r-slurred one. I would have suggested startpage but you just pick an existing engine and their homepage is gay now.
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Startpage just uses Google search results but “allegedly” doesn't collect your data. They're smart enough not to use cookies or any other technique which would be noticeable in the frontend.
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its owned by an ad company now
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I hate to recommend this, but there's ya.ru
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Yandex beats out Google, unironically, for all interesting queries, and that's wild
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Stop bb I can only get so hard
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