Yeah, Google has overtly for, IIRC, about a decade said they are focussing search improvements on personal and even predictive search, so, sure, disable that and the quality goes down.
But that just illustrates that, while there is an obvious advertising incentive for data collection, it actually is relevant to delivering useful search results.
[0]Only 22% of consumers say they are okay with having their information collected indiscriminately by websites to provide a better experience.
Which means by that metric google abuses 88% of it's users unless they go through the means to turn the features off.
Informed consent, access and ownership are all pillars a modern site experience should have when it comes to data collection -- Google fails here and so does DDG in the opposite direction by just never asking which means they can't do any personalization.
The winner here is going to be someone who can provide the better ethical and functional experience. I firmly believe in the next 15 years we will see litigation in the US around data privacy just using California as the canary and Europe recently voted to get even stricter than the GDPR.
That isn't a quote from the referenced link. The quote is "Only 22 percent of consumers agreed that they would be willing to hand over personal data to improve experiences." - which is quite a different thing.
I'm not happy to hand over personal data to improve experiences. But I'm very happy for Google to track what searches I do to improve their results.
Your right it's not a quote I didn't quote it, notice the lack of quotes. I'm also not sure how you are splitting hairs over "information collected indiscriminately" which would be a superset including personal data.
I get https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/20/submit-a-guest-post-to-ext... as the first link
Absolutely. I switched from Google to DDG and Qwant a few weeks ago and was surprised that I didn't see much differences.
But after discussing it with colleagues that were switching back to Google it became apparent that it was because I was siloing Google to its own browser, erasing cookies etc that made it as "inefficient" as the other search engines.
Even with those features on I find constantly outdated information these days.
Yup that article from 2012 Techcrunch with the broken links is really helping me Google.
Disclosure: Currently running an alternative search engine. However I legitimately don't like Google search or Google's practices in the search market, so much so it actually prompted us to throw our hat in the ring.
Edit: I just made the search again, "Techcrunch submission form" The first result for me is from 2006, not 2012, https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/01/how-to-submit-your-company...