Well, it kinda helps that they were the first good search engine. Their name is synonymous with performing a search, much in the way people say "let me grab a k

Well, it kinda helps that they were the first good search engine. Their name is synonymous with performing a search, much in the way people say "let me grab a kleenex" with regard to tissues,or "I used a q-tip to clean my ear, doctors and their advice be damned" with regard to whatever the hell q-tips are called without referencing a brand name. Granted, as a result of that in Google's case, their market dominance is kind of self-perpetuating, because that higher usage leads to better results, since our brains think very similarly, so that thing you were thinking of has already been searched for, and thus their algorithm has already filtered the results down to what you likely want before you even know that you need to search for something. Take a new video game for instance where you want to search for the map or walkthrough for a particular level. You'll get better results using Google, because most other people are already using Google to search for that exact same thing, whereas when I do the same with duckduckgo, it's hit or miss on the results.