[iamnothere]

Depending on your searches, YMMV. I finally switched to DDG at work because Google refused to show me relevant results for some (admittedly obscure) searches related to lensing in F#, preferring instead to give me political opinion pieces(!) that were completely irrelevant to my query, along with various results about video games. DDG had no such problems.

This is one example of many, but it was the last straw for me. I guess techies aren't Google's core audience anymore, I get that, but it feels like we've lost a valuable tool.

[hedora]

For the last decade, the competitors have been meeting or beating Google search relevance in test where the branding is removed.

People that can actually notice a major difference in result quality should probably go work on search optimization.