Google originally won everyone over with superior results, the rest of it came pretty organically.
The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.
The underdog is always everyone's favorite until they somehow wind up on top.
They kept tweaking results and trying to be helpful, and over time building a "bubble" around the individual user rather than trying to produce the objectively best results based on the query.
If there weren't huge companies offering search APIs, DDG simply couldn't compete with Google (without massive scale of their own). As it is, DDG still provides somewhat weaker results in some cases; it is still my primary search engine on all of my devices, and I like it, but when I'm frustrated by the results, I make use of !g and usually find what I'm looking for.
Google was everyone's favorite for a while even after becoming the market leader. And it seems the reasons to dislike google are pretty diverse (although around here I mostly hear "because they forced g+ login on youtube" or "because they killed reader". FTR my biggest annoyances with them was 1: when they killed off Google Desktop Search, 2: the years when they insisted on fuzzing any search until it returned millions of results )
You forgot {{insert all possible privacy concerns}}, and on that wave, total disrespect for user choices. As a very tech savvy human I still can't dodge all their malicious attempts to collect my data, imagine the non savvy human fellow.