I used to think that.

However on a search engine like DDG I now search without worrying of being tracked.

For example I’m researching obesity and diabetes. Do I want Google to know that? Do I want them to infer my potential illnesses from my searches? Hell no and I don’t care how good their search results are.

In my experience DDG is poor when the query is vague. But adding a word or two to make the query more specific helps DDG give results that are as good or better. You eventually get used to it.

Also fun fact but I deleted my entire history from my Google account, going back 15 years or so. Immediately afterwards Google’ search started giving me visibly worse search results.

So Google is being smart by doing your profile based on your history. That seems great at first but when you realize they’ve got more than a decade of data on you and that they know every problem you’ve had (like in my case, they know that my son was born prematurely for example, or that I used to smoke and many other personal issues I can’t share), it should freak you out.

People not worrying about this are either very young and thus don’t have baggage or haven’t thought this through.

The results aren't all that sub-par. For technical questions specifically, they're actually (anecdotally) much better. And the favicons besides the results are a godsend. The only thing I use Google for these days is when looking for something like a company in my area. Because of all its knowledge, Google knows I probably want the "Radio City" in my country, not the one from Toronto or whatever. But those cases are rare predictable, so I prefix it with !gsi without even thinking about it.