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Google was better for the five minutes that pagerank lasted. The only thing it's maintained since is being no worse than the competitors, while being the defaul

Google was better for the five minutes that pagerank lasted. The only thing it's maintained since is being no worse than the competitors, while being the default. In order to become and remain the default they use the profit they make from their old purchase of doubleclick, since ads are what make Google money, in order to bribe and buy competitors. There's no part of this that is good. Other than as a huge monopoly, they can afford to be huge on R&D, just like Bell. They still fail to make money on anything but ads, though, so it's not turning out as well as Bell.

adamc 2y ago
There's all sorts of anecdotal evidence that google searches have gotten steadily worse, and google has stopped supporting parts of its search "API" that mitigated this. So they've been the market leader but haven't continued to improve search in any noticeable way. Sure, other search engines can theoretically compete, but it is an enormous mountain to get enough data to be competitive... and just being "as good" is not enough to get people to switch. So without regulation, google is going to exploit a captive market.