Ahh but generic results are exactly what I am looking for every single time. It is MY job to figure out what I want.

Pretty sure his post was sarcasm. ;-)

Why would you think that? I was being 100% serious.

Then I'm wrong. I for one cringe when others are so passive with how much privacy they are willing to give up.

Your experience is so different from mine! One of the attributes which initially made Google feel trustworthy, back when I first encountered them, was the fact that they didn't nag you to create an account and log in. I loved the fact that I could just go to google.com and search, get good results, and not feel like I was being strong-armed into some commercial relationship in the process. I just wanted to browse the web, after all, I wasn't there to build a relationship with the search company. At the time, this felt like a breath of fresh air; it was part of what I took "don't be evil" to mean.

Of course that quality faded away over the years, but I never grew comfortable with the idea of logging in to Search; it was just too creepy. But eventually it just got ridiculous, and the relentless pushiness of the whole Google+ fiasco was a big part of the reason I switched to DDG.

> Google has something like 10+ years of my saved search history. its just ridiculously good at finding exactly what I'm looking for (which quite often is something I searched in the past).

This is the opposite a lot of the time for me. If I found what I was searching for last time, I wouldn't still be searching but google thinks that because I clicked on it previously, it's what I'm after. If google gets it wrong the first time the wrong results become self reinforcing.