Google’s top search result is Google

Absolutely not. They offered the search engine for free so that advertisers could have a huge platform. Same with Facebook offering its social media platform "for free." It's about the users/eye balls/etc.

Also they've made billions upon billions of dollars in profit from it - how much more do they "deserve" - especially when they are starting to act monopolistic/anti-competitive/stealing competitor IP, ideas, etc

They then did a version of Hotmail with a worse GUI, but virtually limitless disk space.

Google just poaches talent away from more deserving companies, and puts it to work making their products a little worse every year than they were the year before. I'm not thankful for Google. I'm sad because they stifle progress.

You could probably argue that ordinary people don't care about quality and they're best served by using the vertically-integrated Google product, though...

Agree 100%

> and should not be monopolized

There's an argument to be made that search is a case of natural monopoly. Today, google's success doesn't stem from PageRank. It's stems from Learning to Rank algorithms. Every time you click a hit, Google learns something. If you started distributing search traffic amongst a competitive market, no one provider would get the same training data Google gets today. The more competitive the market, the thinner each competitor's training data is - and consequently, the worse their product will be. To illustrate, think about how much better google is than DDG/Bing, and then how much better DDG/Bing is than whatever is third. (Apparently the third best is sufficiently bad that neither you nor I know what it is.)

Since Google is A) pretty far ahead of everyone else in this space and B) extremely secretive about search, it's really difficult to discern how much of their success comes from "more data" and how much comes from "better algos."

> The problem is not Google, its the lack of good alternatives, only DDG really.

My understanding is that a lot of DDG's value comes from using Bing. It's not a pure re-skin, but it aggregates results from multiple search engines and Bing is the biggest. (I'm not a DDG expert so please correct me if I'm getting it wrong here.)

The problem is that Bing is good for the same reasons as Google: they are the second biggest in a winner-takes-most market. They get lots of data (though not enough to be as good as Google), and presumably do all the same things for which people dislike Google.

So in short, maybe regulation is a more realistic goal than competition? I don't actually know where I stand here. I'm sure their are people here who disagree fiercely with everything I'm suggesting. I'd be grateful to hear their counterarguments.

It used to mean "show me web pages related to this input string", and some of those search results were sponsored (ads). Now it's interpreted more as "inform me about this input string" or "please help me with this", like a Siri or Google Assistant (though not necessarily in natural language).

When you view it as a "please assist me" query it makes sense to introduce things like answerboxes, related queries, embedded images or translations, etc. But that is VERY MUCH not "search" anymore.

It's quite possible that most people using a search engine actually want an Assistant, so google's new behavior is ideal for them. But where do you go when you actually want a search engine? You see people complain that over time Google has become worse as a search engine - using it to search for programming topics is definitely worse than it used to be, and its search results in general are often full of astroturfed pinterest or stackoverflow pages.