It’s always going to depend on what you’re searching for. I just tried searching for home coffee roasting on Swiss Cows and all of the results were legit, no crappy spam sites.

Marginalia is great for finding obscure sites but many normal sites don’t show up there. Million Short is a similar idea but with a different approach to achieving it.

The problem of search is actually extremely hard because there are millions of scam and spam sites out there that are full of ads and either AI slop or literally stolen content from other popular sites. Somehow these sites need to be blocked in order to give good results. It’s a never-ending, always-evolving battle, just like blocking spam in email (I still have to check my spam folder all the time because legit emails end up flagged as spam).

I still use web search all the time, I just don’t use Google. There are great alternatives:

• DuckDuckGo
• Ecosia
• Marginalia
• Million Short
• Swiss Cows