[crdb]

I switched due to being frustrated with many Google results being SEO'ed to death. Sometimes one has to dig 3-4 pages to find a decent result. I got the feeling that if what I was searching for was commercialised, I should expect it to be quite hard to find neutral or deep results (kind of how when you're looking up a company, all you'll find in the news are PR releases disguised as industry articles).

My subjective and anecdotal experience has been that DDG filters the signal out of the noise much better in 80% of situations. In both personalised searches (e.g. for restaurants, which should be geo-localised, a recent search from Singapore sent me to Connecticut...) and for some specific items where Google has built some custom extra logic, such as movies or "site:", the added keystrokes of !g is not much effort. So I haven't switched back. It does feel like Google is a little smarter on some searches but - and I can't think of an example straight off the cuff - sometimes too smart for its own good and stuck in local optima. DDG offers a less noisy, more generalised view on the world which I prefer most of the time.

One nice thing about personalisation is the integration if you use a lot of Google products. For example, when my brother sent me his flight details, the flight was automatically added to my calendar, and Google Now showed me details on the day including the terminal and luggage belt, reminded me to leave on time and estimated the Uber wait time and even the fee (not to mention Maps can send you straight on to the Uber app with the start and end points entered). These things are either incredibly creepy or, if you trust Google and can't afford humans to do the same job, very useful.

[digi_owl]

Thing about Google's services is the eternal dilemma between tech and business.

I suspect the techies that implemented the services initially had the best of intentions with them.

But then comes the suits further up the chain, that has as their primary motivation to maximize ROI.

[crdb]

I think it's simpler than that: there's a war on between the SEO lot and Google. As SEO teams get better and better at mimicking a signal, Google needs to keep upping their game to let the valuable stuff get through without being drowned in about.com spam (sometimes the same text can be found in 10 successive clones of about.com) or companies upping their ranking. Then you get feedback loops as people's expectations adjust to the new reality.

Right now, if I type "!g clothes" my top result is missguided.co.uk; if I go to google.com and type "clothes", my top result is nastygal.com (ironic that both of these companies have "naughty" branding, when they are so good at spamming search results). Clearly both of these fashion companies have excellent SEO teams, but there might also be a factor of people expecting shops when they type a non-brand keyword.

DDG is also filled with shops (presumably affiliate links, since that's their business model) but the top/separate result is the Wikipedia article for clothing, which is actually informative if I wanted to read about clothes.

It's a good business decision for Google to have high quality search results. The problem with the previous search companies is that they sucked. Most/all of the top results were paid. There was little thought about relevance. Google won so hard because it allowed people a way to browse the enormous amount of information on the web in a structured way taking into account relevance. The ads need people to keep coming, which won't happen if other search companies are more relevant. The dynamic will be that whoever wins the search battle will end up being the new target for SEO spam and eventually develop the same problems.

[cpeterso]

DDG supports site: searches too. :)

[crdb]

Not as well or fast* in my experience. I keep trying the DDG features and switching when they get good enough...

* in fact speed is my main gripe with DDG. After years of getting used to almost instant results, waiting a few seconds is frustrating...