So you might as well take their money because they're a near monopoly anyways and in exchange for that money we will continue to make sure they stay a near monopoly? You don't see anything self-perpetuating in that? Why not duckduckgo or even startpage.com to least have an intermediary if they really care about these things?
They had Yahoo! as a default for a decent amount of time. The got out because promised quality improvements didn't materialize, according to court filings.
Is there any search engine that approaches the quality of Google search results yet, or ideally, improves on them?