Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.
I used DDG for a long time, it's crap, I switched back to Google, I suspect a lot of people would do the same. There isn't a lot of competition.
I tired Kagi, it's good too, but I didn't feel like the cost was justified when Google is free. I will probably try Kagi again someday though, I did like it and I think their mission is pretty cool.
Worth retrying now. I tried again recently and the results are so much better. Combine that with the domain block/raise/pin feature and the search engine is way ahead.
I'm 10x happier with Kagi than Google, and I was very skeptical (having followed Google's devs very closely as acquisition specialist for ~10+y). If you can afford Kagi, I'm curious to know why you don't stick with it. Or I'll assume that because the Google brand is just too strong, in which case we have a particular case of a monopoly.
You are literally agreeing with the parent commenter. It's anticompetitive but not a monopoly. The parent is also talking about Chrome, not Google Search.
I never said I disagreed with their entire comment, I was responding to the statements saying "switching search engines is easy and google is obviously the superior product that's why it's used instead of bing.com".
That should have been clear from my comment and if you look at other comments in this thread you'll see others interpreted the parent comment similarly.
I suggest you read others comments more charitably.
Incorrect.
Google spent ungodly amounts of money to make sure that their search engine was the default in as many places as possible. People didn't "choose" to use it, they use the defaults.
And in some cases, like my Android phone, google is the only option for integrated searches. I cannot use another search engine without opening a browser then opening up the search engine of choice.
Monopoly may not be the right term, but anticompetitive is. They outspent every other search provider to make sure their product was used. They paid off apple to not develop a search engine and instead use theirs as a default. These are things in the court documents which caused the ruling to go against them.