> google search used to be the best in my native language, but these days I find myself doing !g less and less on DuckDuckGo, again not really because of privac

> google search used to be the best in my native language, but these days I find myself doing !g less and less on DuckDuckGo, again not really because of privacy concerns but because the whole first page of my google search results are commercials for places that I’m not going to use. Of course we're discussing anecdotal evidences here, and Google searches have deteriorated for me, too, but for a lot of things DuckDuckGo fails to find the most relevant results and I tend to use !g quite often (~20% of the time). This might be due to SEO fighting making Googles results less relevant, but DDG is not steeled against this either. I agree on your general point, though; Google has lost a lot of competitive headway. On the other hand, however, it still has a lot of market penetration: YouTube is the largest video platform by far, Google search is "the internet" to a lot of people and while Android is technically a free OS, it practically belongs to Google. Also, there's still gmail, and for people to take the effort of switching mails takes quite some convincing.