I must be the only person who has found that for most searches, DDG gives me what I want better than Google does. The problem is only in the 1-5% of cases where

I must be the only person who has found that for most searches, DDG gives me what I want better than Google does. The problem is only in the 1-5% of cases where DDG just isn't optimized for the query (programming is one of those). When I use g!, I find the Google experience horrible. The UI/UX sucks, it surfaces a lot of irrelevant results. I also find that the AI meant to improve the experience is rarely a benefit, and often makes it worse. And Google seems so far out of its depth in AI that its systems meant to promote "social justice and equality" often seem to backfire and fail on their own terms. I just now tried to search "black man" in both Google images and DDG images, and the results are exactly representative of my problems with Google's failure as a search engine. The top two G results are George Floyd and Ahmad Arbery, and the fourth is actually a white boy accused of stabbing a black man. The pièce de résistance was two or three rows down, where G suggested "related searches" and the top one was "black man funny" and a thumbnail of a picture that at the very least was mockery (including it as the representation for "black man funny" is just racist). The full list of results included what looked like literal minstrelsy and other mockery. I am by no means a social justice activist, but I detest racism and this is what Google was promoting. And regardless of my views, Google clearly holds itself up as some sort of agent of social change, so why is it so racist? DDG, by contrast, showed pictures of professional men in the top results. (Just as an aside, one of the common themes black people call out about racism is that poor black kids - boys in particular - are indoctrinated to believe that sports, entertainment or crime are their only avenues for opportunity in life. This is usually portrayed as a systemic issue, which teachers, institutions (banks, potential employers, government bureaucracy) and the media perpetuate with a sort of resigned, inertial Kafkaesque belief that things will never change. If we are to accept the views of social justice activists, how do the top Google results not literally reinforce these stereotypes, before promoting a literally racist set of search results?) In my experience, Google started declining when it doubled down on AI far too early, and now their system is too complex for anyone to understand or wrangle. Google is the present-day Leviathan, and independent of their horrible privacy practices and political-ideological alignment, their software just seems defective.