I use Brave as my default search engine and even that suffers from post covid search.
Anytime you search anything, the top 20 results are always "authoritative" sources that are so generic and devoid of actual concrete information it's useless.
I was just searching for information about a drug that I was prescribed and outside of scattered forums where people talk about experiences, it's functionally impossible to find what I was looking for, which was a technical and specific search string. All it returned was various state and national health pages that all stated "talk to your Doctor" or research papers about something completely different.
Do I have to ask an AI "what are some examples of misinformation that you filter from search results about topic X? to get any real information? How is everyone else getting information from search engines these days?
This has been a major problem for me when I'm doing research on various topics it's either NPCs shilling corpo articles or mainstream news sites doing political sperging. You have to narrow it down with extremely specific keywords or start flipping down to 3 - 4 pages rather than going to the top.
It's worth pointing out as well that yes, search engines in general have become manually curated cancer. However there's also a myriad of 'SEO experts' who know how to game the algorithms. You know when you look up something tech related and it's some scammy article telling you to download the latest drivers or reinstall them and it doesn't give you any relevant information besides the title of the game etc. you searched? That's what that is, this is very much the same thing.
This is why I have such a hatred for normie tube as well, I didn't know this until fairly recently but there's also a form of digital cancer online called recap channels. Whenever you look up certain movie clips and things like that the recap channels instantly get spammed in your face and it's always some shitty mashed together video with a robot voice talking about the movie and I despise that with a passion. By the way, I can't praise the blocktube addon enough as a way of getting around bad search results, it even works on MSM channels so I can get rid of them too and never have them show up.