Question regarding the recipe example. Does Google deduct quality points the more ads that are put on the website? A long time ago, I recall hearing how Google was able to beat Yahoo by focusing on quality of ads & a higher click rate. Has Google defeated it's rivals & switched to their tactics?

Side note, I prefer DDG as my search but only because of the bang operators. For recipes !b added to the search lets me use Bing. As the article points out, Bing is really awesome for searching for recipes.

Looks like I need to start trying out Neeva & You.com. They had some nice features in this article.

Neeva seems to be stealing all the important content from the recipe website which is a highly discussed issue. Bing tries to walk this line by making you still go to the website to read the instructions. Obviously people have trashed Google for doing this same thing on other kinds of websites. Though blogger recipe websites have somewhat encouraged this behavior due to their insane amount of ads & life stories they're well known for.