Did you notice that the world's most popular search engine has been almost entirely a facade for over 5 years now?
Not just a 'left leaning' or 'ivermectin censoring' engine, but an engine that is almost entirely an illusion.
The publicly accessible version of Google Search now has less than one-hundred-thousandth of the web searching ability it had in 2005.
Did you even notice?
Did you notice that nearly every other search engine (DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo... even Russia's Yandex) is a similarly fake search engine?
Want more details?
Here's a post and a video from a couple of noticers.
Yandex produces about 250 results for the same test query (climate change) and nearly all from the officially sanctioned "trusted" sources, and sources that don't question the official climate change narrative.
With a real search engine, there would be millions (if not billions) of results for 'climate change'.
Yandex also hit me with a Captcha for the 'suspicious activity' of viewing results beyond the first 100 😄
Seems like that is more about censoring than searching ability. I can find nearly anything with google, just have to be very specific with search terms and use key words specific to what a person is trying to find. If google is being a real censoring snot I will try other search engines. Brave works most of the time in those situations.
OP's five orders of magnitude seems about right. Archie and Veronica (search tools) were supposed to provide everything everywhere, and Google started with that approach and over time realized that its algorithmic results were not hurt by indexing everything and selecting from the index (total resources are indeed a limit but not that much of one), and over more time all its woke filters got worked into that algorithm. Getting 100-300 max results on any item is insanely wrong and not search. One would think the market would intervene ....
Pretty much, yea. If no prior knowledge then start with a generic result and start reading, pick out words or phrases that go in the direction you want and keep refining from there. It takes time. But yea, we shouldn't have to do it that way.
Actually, it's worse than that.
You can know that the page exists and have the exact text on the page in your query and Yandex can (and frequently will) still disallow it from showing up in your search results.
And it's not a minor censorship thing; all of these these engines that we're led to believe are competing against each other to be the most capable and most popular are simultaneously blocking off the vast majority of the Internet.
Your searches are being performed on a tiny pocket of the Internet that someone has deemed permissible.
That's not what worries me most though.
What worries me most is that they predicted that the vast majority of the public wouldn't even notice, and they were apparently right.
kek. Just came back to check comments from yesterday and I see that people didn't agree with what I said.
Could always go the tor route......