I think we should stop talking about search engines (meaning "a google") as a single service, since it really isn't, but rather a series of more or less interco

I think we should stop talking about search engines (meaning "a google") as a single service, since it really isn't, but rather a series of more or less interconnected services. The notion of Internet Search is too nebulous to be able to have meaningful discussions about it. It's much more enlightening to talk about which demand is being satisfied. Google satisfies several disparate demands, including: * Internet discovery * Product discovery * E-commerce discovery * Brick&mortar commerce discovery * Geographical discovery * Fact discovery (question-answering) All of these services have very little friction. Having a single interface helps with that, but I don't think it's a necessity. Low friction is though. Nobody wants to sign up for a service to get what google gives away ostensibly without that hassle. It does most of these things decently well, largely thanks to being able to profile its users accurately. I don't think a competitor will replace Google by trying to copy their model and do all these things. Google is far too entrenched. There's really no reason why you would need to compete against the combined offering of Google. At several of these tasks, it's quite possible to outperform them. Especially in commercial discovery, there really aren't any good offerings right now. Finding the best something for the price range is frustrating, time consuming and annoying. An LLM-based question-answering mostly satisfies the fact discovery need, not so much the others. This is of course fine, but it's important to understand that Google's killer functionality has never been answering questions, it's never been very good at that task. Arguably, the seamless localization of the results is a much more important aspect.