I don't know what a 'SERP' is but I don't think anyone shows up at Google bright and early in the morning with the burning desire to deliver the 'USA Today' quality of search. In fact, we had it before Google came along and it left much to be desired.
I don't know much about blueberry pie searches either or if the quality of Google results is really in decline. It seems pretty reasonable to expect original content (StackOverflow) to show up before copies of the same content. Or the top search engine to aim for a quality standard above 'USA Today'. Otherwise we can just use USA Today instead of Google.
The StackOverflow scrapers ranking higher than SO is the thing that most irks me about the big G at the moment. That and all the sites like wareseeker that just act as pointless aggregators of FLOSS download sites or forum sites.
Last time I tried Bing though they weren't any better, and DuckDuckGo had really low coverage. Maybe it's time to try again.
I use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, since I figured out the bang syntax. If I don't like the results, I just resend the same query with !g prefixed (!google works, too, and so does !bing).
I don't know much about blueberry pie searches either or if the quality of Google results is really in decline. It seems pretty reasonable to expect original content (StackOverflow) to show up before copies of the same content. Or the top search engine to aim for a quality standard above 'USA Today'. Otherwise we can just use USA Today instead of Google.