Agreed. That's around the time I started using some weird setup where my google searches would go through Tor and I was blocking their cookies. It was overboard, probably unnecessary and probably didn't accomplish much, but it was the result of getting a creepy vibe from google. Once I discovered DDG, I switched and never looked back. It took a little while to get used to it, but the results are good enough that I keep using it. I run maybe a few google searches a year if I can't find what I need on DDG and I usually don't find it there either. I don't think google is significantly better, although it is noticeably faster. There's nothing about it that's appealing enough that I want to accept the bad things that also come with it.