The first: Good search results. Yeah everyone knows that right. But young people today might have forgotten the second reason we liked Google search back then:
The Second: A clean page with a single logo and search field. It loaded quick. There were no banners everywhere, no bs.
HackerNews has that feel. It is clean, information dense, and does what it needs to do.
News use to be my default homepage but surprisingly MSN gives me a much better product with more then 4 stories on the page on 32" monitors.
I miss the Google of the “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful” era.
Google Plus could have been fine if it wasn't rammed down user's throats. But no, every product had to integrate with it, had to look like it .... because ... Steve Jobs said so ? Then came Vic Gundotra with all the high craftsmanship of political empire building maneuvering and little else. Probably broke the original internal culture if it had survived till then (not sure).
I'll check out MSN.
Old Google News clone.
I haven’t seen any one TV like that. Poland’s Teletext services are full of lonely hearts spam and are generally worthless, even though still alive.
Another easy way to see the difference is to load each site up in a text-only browser like links. You'll find that DDG has the cleanest interface there, too.
I still use Startpage most of the time due to the generally better search results, but DDG is my backup and sometimes finds things Startpage (i.e. Google) doesn't.
http://aautar.digital-radiation.com/blog/uploaded_images/goo...
Google was all about search at the beginning. I still went to Yahoo and MSN for news and information. But I think some time after mid 2000, a lot of folks began to shift from going to portal to get information, to typing keywords "news" in Google search. Somehow we are hooked to typing keywords. When Google finally released news.google.com now users could have a quick navigation of current events. This behavior is manifested in the era of social media. So many people are now getting news from logging onto facebook / twitter. To verify, as a smart reader I would search on Google, hoping to find a full version from reputable news sites.
In some countries/culture, portal is still preferred. e.g. Yahoo Japan being one. There are still some values of Yahoo.com; I still go there if I am looking up finance news or some pop-culture entertainment news (no other new sites do better than Yahoo on entertainment news broadcast).
PS. It's also the reason Google now is increasingly less special (but they do try to keep it simple when they can, subtly).
Duckduckgo is (for me) the new google in terms of speed, but the search results are not the same quality.