That’s why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft’s privacy-invading tracking):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo#Controversies
Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who’s paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:
https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf
But Google doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task
If you want to know why everything sucks, that was it, in a nutshell. Corporations are colluding to get to 2 or 3 per market, so as to avoid the strictest definition of a “monopoly,” so they settle for duopolies and triopolies. And then they work together to take ALL the profit out of the entire ecosystem, and do things like use that money to buy back stocks and then sell their options and put that money in their pocket. Good for the people at the top, with those options, I guess. Everyone else? In the entire world? Suck it.