Many people seem to complain about the low quality Google search but don't often offer any better alternatives. I can't help but feel like sometimes the quality of the Google search results reflect the quality of the web in general: stocked with a whole lot of spam content that people actually consume.
In my experience, DDG search results are worse, not better, and people who say otherwise are mental or lying.
I discovered the other day that DDG uses Bing for image searching because without safe searching enabled it randomly returns tons of pornography for innocuous searches like "filled torus".
Doesn't DDG rely pretty heavily on Bing period? I am under the impression that they are returning (maybe slightly augmented) Bing results for pretty much everything.
We start over with a new web. Let's take what we learned from the current one and just start with a straight-up application platform.
Create a virtual architecture, what would traditionally have been called a Virtual Machine before the term was overloaded, comprised of a simple instruction set and memory mapped devices (ideally simple enough that you could write an interpreter for it in an afternoon). Write an LLVM backend for it. Sandbox it by default so that it isn't even allowed to pull data from anywhere other than the same socket it came in on without permissions, or play sound, or anything an advertiser thinks is a good idea. Don't over-complicate the rendering by forcing some kind of automated re-flow crap, just provide the relevant display metrics directly to the program (resolution, px density, viewing distance, orientation, etc.) and let it choose how to best represent itself.
How do we fix the web?