People say, that most people are connected by i don't know how many direct relationships (6?). The same may have been true for web pages.
When the search engines were much worse, people were using webrings, pingbacks, whatever - I remember going through lists of links at the end of paper magazines. Web was optimized for this kind of searching. It was called surfing for a reason.
Search engines like google hugely distorted the incentives on the web. In the name of seo and adsense people did crazy things to the web (as an ecosystem). There has been an entire cottage industry of individuals creating websites specialized just for getting pagerank for other websites, or for capturing audiences via other tricks (mirroring other websites or public/national databases), or for making the website a soup of boldened keywords.
Anyway, there are specialized searches all around, if you look. Product searches, torrent searches, Shodan, whois, transportation, pretty much anything that's annoying to search for in Google has a better alternative somewhere.
Can't say I see meaningful difference between DDG and Google on this anymore.
DDG keeps getting better and Google has been on a downward spiral for some time.
> It can find result using synonyms instead of the original words.
DDG does this as well. And unlike Google they aren't driving me crazy by ignoring my double quotes and verbatim searches.