At this point, they're not that great at either ads or search. They just have a huge amount of market share momentum behind them. They're then able to then use

At this point, they're not that great at either ads or search. They just have a huge amount of market share momentum behind them. They're then able to then use this to influence and mold the web in the direction that suits/grows their business. E.g. AMP, HTTPS, google-play lock-in, no-root access on devices, and a host of things that all synergize with each other to make it next to impossible to fight back as a consumer (even a skilled/informed one). Regarding them not being that great at search. It's non-trivial to see how blog-spam and fake generated websites are pummeling google's results. We've all encountered it, and have learned to kinda skim/ignore it to get to what we really want, but it's there, and it's dragging us all down. Not only that, but here we are more than 2 decades since they started, and being one of the largest data companies in the world with untold amounts of potential training data, and they can barely do basic search inference. They practically guess the most likely "thing" you are actually searching for and don't bother to go further. Checking whether the content of the site speaks to the "thing" or "noun" that you want instead of just having it as text inside of it? Forget it. Maybe if I append certain things it means I want the thing I'm searching for to be somehow related to this additional term? Call me crazy, but I would have imagined that at this point we would be living in an actual digital super age instead of what we have now. I am no longer going to say that we have "all of humanity's combined knowledge" at the tips of our fingers. We simply don't. We have basic facts and a whole host of brain-vomit content that I have to read/watch in order to extract the information I need, without even being able to tell how authoritative it is.