google search is only as useful as the content that it points to. They used to incentivize people to make good content, now they re just stealing it, so people naturally will take their content off google or hide it behind walls.

It's also not "leaps and bounds ahead beyond anything else" , but they have the network effect and technical lock in to be safe enough. Two things they did: first, they promoted the usage of the omnibox as search box, so now almost every browser is auto subscribed to google,and subscriptions are sticky. Second, they stopped sending the search referrer to the target sites and worked to remove referrers completely from the web. This precludes target sites from providing a competitive search experience. Google now stands uniquely and exclusively in the pathway from the users' search bar to the destination website, and extracting the rents.