DuckDuckGo "most commonly" uses Bing for link search results, so it would mostly be redirecting queries to Microsoft: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

You're trivializing search. DDG only works because for the hard stuff it's grandfathered into an old Bing API. DDG is small and scrappy but it's built on the shoulders of a giant investing billions of dollars.

Nonetheless, they have customers because a need (for privacy) hasn't been met by others. They're also probably making microsoft money.

(I just wonder if microsoft has some sort of method of identifying or matching queries with actual people)

Right, but the average person doesn't know about DDG--sure word would catch on, but the initial break would cause major friction for the vast majority of people.

Also, what happens to all that data in stowed away in other services? What happens, with Gmail if it's separated from the ads division? Do they suddenly start charging everyone to use it? Can they still run ads in Gmail? Would they have access to the infra serving those ads? If they flame out completely do we lose all our data? Will they give us a chance to export it? In what format?....

I just can't help but feel these sorts of breaks would be extremely difficult to get right.

Swapping one monopoly for another really isn't the answer we want.

Speaking as one who worked with many who'd cheared Microsoft over IBM, who myself once saw Google, and later Apple, as just deserts for Microsoft's own monopoly abuses, and presently relies principally on DDG for Web search, and acknowledges that it too relies heavily, though not exclusively, on Microsoft's Bing.

Providing a useful tech capacity without winner-take-all monopolies should be the goal. And result.

Search naturally tends towards monopoly; nobody wants to navigate to half a dozen separate sites to and parse through the results of each individually to find what they want.

All of them would be ad supported too, thanks to the fact that we in the software industry have conditioned users to expect things for "free" and advertisers would also want to put the bulk of their ad dollars toward the most effective search engine to get the most bang for the buck, again reinforcing the trend toward monopoly.

The only alternative that comes to mind is to make search a government run public utility but, as I'm sure a number of you are thinking rather loudly right now, that comes with its own set of problems.

How does one address monopoly in similar circumstances?

I mean, honestly, it would just be a massive surge of users to Bing. I don't think any of the other competitors have the existing public name recognition.

After switching to DDG (and recently, Bing after switching to Edge), I don't think Google's stock web-search is that much better. Not saying it's not better - it is - but if it disappeared from the face of the Earth, we'd all survive perfectly well on the alternatives.

Google Maps, though, is still unquestionably king. It is ludicrous how poor the alternatives are.

In the west there's just two full search engines backing all the others anyways. None of the others have the infrastructure to index the internet