I’m sick of having to deal with Google, scholar or otherwise. Broad search yields page after page of irrelevant crap. Narrowing search by putting quotes around each term either yields page after page of irrelevant word frequency list crap, or one paged of irrelevant crap.
I’m thinking it might help if I could search for specific topics. I’m worried it would mean only searching paywalled academic journals. But even that might be better than searching gorram word frequency lists. I use a blocklist extension to block most word frequency lists, but still have to scroll down each page, check that there’s nothing, move to the next page, again, again, again.
I use go duck go. It’s not as slick as google, but not tracking me either.
For academic stuff, consider the unpaywall add-on. I don’t think it changes what is searched, but it will sniff out unlocked copies of articles. I host copies of all my papers on my site, unpaywall indexes that and makes them visible to searchers. You click on the paywalls article, and a green lock symbol pops up, linking you to a free copy.
I think the biggest problem is that search engines either drop or synonymize search terms without warning, and old standards such as using search terms, using + before search terms, using quotes around search terms, etc. each get phased out.