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I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it. Is Google somehow supp

I don't think that if Google vanished tomorrow, a new crop of superior search engines would suddenly pop out of the ether to replace it. Is Google somehow suppressing the creation of a good search engine? No, on the contrary it has created the best web search engine we've ever seen. I would personally be sad if you took it away from me, and I suspect that 99% or more of its users would be in the same boat (don't judge the zeitgeist by web forum echo chambers). You break up monopolies when they are harming users, not in order to cause harm to users.

gmueckl 7y ago
Google's search engine is a unique portal into the WWW in that it heavily controls what parts of the web people get to see. Opinions can be shaped, facts can be suppressed, lifes can be ruined by the decisions that go into search result prioritizing. With the world being what it is today, Google Search is in an extremely powerful position. We depend a lot on information that we find on the web. And these free form search queries are the best UI we have at the moment to retrieve it. It is a good thing that Google Search is good and is getting better, but that doesn't take away from the fact that they wield a lot of power that needs to be checked somehow.