It used to be, I'd start at DDG andwhen I didn't find my results, I'd switch to Goog. Now I do this, but when I find even worse results on Google, I switch back to DuckDuck because query wrangling on DDG is more worthwhile. The starting results may not always be good on DDG, but they're often better than Google.

However, very recently I've been starting on Searx on doing follow-up checks on Bing, and this has been working pretty well. I know DDG has to show ads, but lately they seem to take up the better part of the first page and aren't helpful.

Google is completely out of the picture. Their results are just bad.

What if these are primary places where user generated content lives now?

Plenty of high quality user generated content live on Discord, Slack, and other semi-private information exchanges that aren't as easy to parse and scrape. Places like Reddit and Stack Exchange and DeviantArt are just the prior-gen iteration of hosting for those conversations. But they're being overwhelmed with bots, marketing teams, special interest mods, and ideologues to the point that they can only deliver a very niche set of content catering to whomever "owns" the space.

another part is that youtube and reddit are the only places where SEO and chatgpt hasn't (totally) destroyed the search results