> Why is it actually winner-take-all? The power of defaults, mostly. The average user experience of picking up an internet-connected device has been very inte

> Why is it actually winner-take-all? The power of defaults, mostly. The average user experience of picking up an internet-connected device has been very intentionally cultivated by Google. Whether you're in your browser or on your phone, Google's spent a lot of money building up Chrome as a browser ecosystem, Android on mobile, and paying off Apple on iPhones and competing browser vendors like Firefox, to guarantee that, whenever possible, Google is always the default search engine. The only non-Google default will typically be on Edge, which only has about 5-6% penetration. Since Google historically has always been the best search engine in the space, does not explicitly charge its users money, and (at least for average users) is really good at surfacing what they're looking for, most users feel no need to look elsewhere for a search engine because the default just works, switching would demand an effort, and Google is what they'd want anyways. The moat isn't big, but Google has put a ton of work into ensuing that any competing search engine requires an intentional and active choice of users to seek you out while they're worse. At least until the recent AI play by Bing, this tiny moat was always sufficient, because if you start from scratch on search, you're essentially guaranteed to be worse, and all other 'serious' offerings under the hood were weak alternatives: essentially one of "Bing search API wrappers" (worse results), "nation-state-actor search engines" (for most users, worse results), or "Google, but with some cursory privacy measures, a subscription fee, or filtration features" (which wasn't something most users care about). Recent chat AI represents a competing alternative to doing a search in the first place, which jeopardizes the "we have essentially all defaults and users can't be assed to switch to a worse search" barrier to entry that Google historically relies on, which is ringing alarm bells for them.