[ordu]

The problem is I don't want to find relevant results. If results I looking for are relevant, than I need not a great search engine to find them. If I know what I want to find it would be pretty simple to find them with grep over internet.

If I want to find local takeaway pizza, than all I need is to find where am I, and then to add my location to a request. Probably I wish to use not the text prompt search engine, but maps.google.com or some other tool dedicated to searching for local things.

But if I'm trying to find basic information on topic not common for me, than I would have troubles with personalized search. And the worst case happens when I don't realize than I'm looking for information that is not common for me: when I know this fact I can do something with search query to make it uncommon and to hope that it will break personalization, but if I don't know I would do nothing special, and I will risk to miss a whole segment of Internet which contains heaps of information relevant to my needs. It is the same story as with FB and political views of users but at wider scale.

It is really hard to find something new for me. I use DDG for several years for this single reason. I have no strong emotions to ads, because I use NoScript and uBlock: ads are not a problem. But narrow results space is a problem.

[TheCoelacanth]

What I would prefer is context sensitive filtering options to let you refine your search after you have performed it. For example, if I search for "ruby", there will be results related to the programming language, the gemstone and for people named Ruby, and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me, so why not give me visibility into which one it is picking and let me switch to the others?

[Fnoord]

> and Google is guessing which one I want based on what it knows about me

That's a bit of an empty statement. I assume it also looks at the other terms, or your previous searches (from your IP or Google Account). Because there might be a time where you are searching for a person Ruby (the capital letter gives it away) or a gem called ruby.