To interpret GP charitably I think they mean that Google is there not because they are a good search engine these days but because of inertia.
For you as a site owner, Google is the best: it delivers the impressions.
For a user who wants to search, Google has gone downhill since around 2009 and the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for.
(The usual answer is: "It is so much harder than in 2009 and SEO is so crazy these days, that nobody can do it, not even Google", to which I have to point out that even marginalia - run by one Swede - manages to do it in the niches it prioritizes.)
> the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for.
I have the same frustration. The killer feature that got me to switch from Google to DDG was that DDG would reliably return results for the search query I entered, long after Google had stopped doing so. Now that they've taken the same path the benefit is much less. Although I suspect this is more due to a change on the part of Bing than a conscious decision from DDG.
For you as a site owner, Google is the best: it delivers the impressions.
For a user who wants to search, Google has gone downhill since around 2009 and the only thing that confuse me is why DDG - who initially felt better - chose to run after Google down the path of insisting to give me results for things I didn't ask for.
(The usual answer is: "It is so much harder than in 2009 and SEO is so crazy these days, that nobody can do it, not even Google", to which I have to point out that even marginalia - run by one Swede - manages to do it in the niches it prioritizes.)