rieter

Because right now there are only 2 companies in the world with sufficient technical chops to build a competent end-to-end modern search engine. It's a HARD problem. No startup can do it.

Yet DDG will never be as fast as a real search engine since it relies on external APIs (Yahoo BOSS, etc).

Good thing Chrome has a built-in secure PDF reader.

Microsoft is a clear monopoly.

Many people and businesses have no choice but to use Windows. It's nearly impossible to buy a computer without Windows, especially if you're picky about configurations. Even if the choice exists (Apple), switching involves considerable costs: buying all new hardware, moving to different application software, retraining personel, dealing will legacy and proprietary file formats.

In contrast, moving to a different search engine is easy and free. There are no barriers to switch.

It has a much higher resolution than iPhone 3GS. In fact, it has six times more pixels.

It's more like the lead developer screwed up with Wave so badly that he lost all credibility and had to leave. Google gave him all resources he asked for and he produced a shitty overhyped product.

There is no proof of "degradation of search results" whatsoever. You could always find a bunch of search queries which don't work quite right and write a sensationalist article about it.

Has anyone done a scientific study, involving careful observation of quality of thousands representative queries on Google over a prolonged period of time? No.

If anything, the recent hysteria only shows how good Google has been at increasing people's expectation of search quality over the years.

Security.