Wow, at what point do their profits balloon enough that Google's moat is no longer intimidating enough to fend off a gold rush of people willing to pour heaps of money and ingenuity into outdoing their search product? I've been searching with Google since the beginning and it definitely feels worse than in the days of yore, yet they make more money than ever...

Who has access to the amount of data that Google does? Microsoft and Apple come to mind, but they are already profitable for their own reasons so may not want to risk their current profit centers doing the "shady" work Google is known for (not necessarily saying Google is evil/shady, but their products have a reputation).

Microsoft pretty clearly does "shady" stuff with all the Windows desktop telemetry and ads.

They don't make money at search, they make money on advertising.

Yes, a moat is not a profit centre, it is a cost centre. You appear to have misunderstood the point you replied to.

“Or department”

Regardless, the fear of marginally reducing profits drives companies to do a bunch of things that are fundamentally pretty gross.