Google used to understand that the products were the product and the ads were a necessity to pay people. That the ads would be worthless without people coming back to use their services, and that that should be the primary goal.

That's been proven untrue by the MBAs and the market. Google no longer creates good products, but the ad dollars flow more and more. People still significantly use Google search.

I'm of the belief that that's purely inertia - That Google was so successful at it's products that even though they're losing steam fast, they're still good products for now, but that they're gonna see a steep dive soon and not be able to recover.

I use Google Search because the results are superior to Bing or DuckDuckGo, across many instances during the day.

Or if they’re not superior they’re not inferior.

Whereas when I use other search engines I have the nagging feeling I’m missing better information on Google.

> when I use other search engines I have the nagging feeling I’m missing better information on Google.

Are you though?

I've been using DDG for years now as my primary search engine.

When I started, I used !g quite often precisely because of that feeling. These days I have a hard time even remembering to try it when a search is unfruitful.

The reason being that it became less and less useful, and these days even when I do remember trying it, it generally doesn't add anything useful to my results.

DDG has been a non-start for image searches. But for limited scope things like looking up software libraries (basically: I already know what I want) I’ve found it to be fine.

It is better on mobile, but on desktop google.com gives almost a full page of ads before the first result.

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