[PeterisP]

For practical usage e.g. finding information on technical topics (where reliably getting relevant results quickly is important, and randomly finding/exploring new "interesting" content is not), the google's personalization is immensely valuable to me; it gives me a source telling what I want on the first try, but the more-privacy-less-personalization alternatives can find the same thing only if I fine-tune the query multiple times.

Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do. If you actually know what you're looking for, then you want the answer you wanted to be on the top, and any exploration is a flaw that only gets in your way.

[hobofan]

> Unfettered exploration is for dicking around when you have nothing better to do.

It's also very useful for learning new things.

Yes, Google probably does a better job than ever before in finding me the most relevant StackOverflow result, but for exploration usage it's become very useless.

I've had the theory that the growing popularity of "awesome"-lists and its likes is mainly due to Google's reduced explorability.

[marksellers]

I find curated lists better for exploration than search, but perhaps I just lost my ability to search whimsically. To each their own I guess.