Actually, in this regard, I trusted blindly my fellow students with that. As I mentioned I studied CS until this summer, so I was surrounded by a couple of people who were really into networking, NAS and this kind of stuff. And a couple of guys just recommended QNAP to me because they had to do a lot with it during work or privately and they loved it. I knew those people know a lot more than me about that topic so I just trusted them blindly. Regarding the "more results": I don't know how to interpret that, but it doesn't necessarily correlate with the quality. If QNAP has three times more users than Synology, the vocal minority might appear more overall, even when possibly being a smaller user percentage. That said, I never compared, looked for user feedback or have any other info about Synology. I just can speak for my experience with my QNAP. No critical or questioning buying process. Sorry bud.
I won't argue reliability one over the other. I was curious if you had any insight. As far as what I can find, there are about six times as many reviews on Amazon for the Synology box as there are for the QNAP, so there's that. On the other hand, the QNAP reviews are a little more positive. Having messed around with the QNAP's UI, I'd need a pretty compelling reason to go that way; the Synology UI is a lot more intuitive to me. Don't interpret this as me not sincerely appreciating your input - I've enjoyed this decision not at all and every datapoint I can scrounge helps. Personal experience helps loads. Thanks a whole bunch.