The best way to get useful answers was (and for me still is) to ask Goggle for "How do I blah site:stackoverflow.com". Without the site filter, Google results suck or are just a mess, and stackoverflow's own search is crap.

Google used to be better but so was stack overflow. Now a lot of the answers are out-dated. And even more importantly they got rid of any questions where the answer was even a little bit subjective. Unfortunately for users that's almost all the most useful answers.

Kagi…

Fully switched over more than a year ago and never looked back.

I had a kagi account for a year, but it’s just bing with some admittedly nice features on top.

I don’t get the results because there’s just not a lot of people talking about what I’m interested in.

Kagi with the "Programming" lense turned on

Nowadays, I just read manuals, docs and books. I mostly use search as a quick online TOC or for that specific errors I’m in no mood to debug.