Worth emphasising IMO. People are conditioned to using Google and its quirks, that can make alternatives engines a little less intuitive. Also they're often criticised for overrunning verticals with their own offerings. My favourite example being celebritynetworth.
Sorry didn't get this, what do you mean exactly?
Celebritynetworth is an example of this where a site had some unique content, G apparently realised that lots of people search for such stuff, asked the owner for an API and then eventually scraped it. A rough version of events, more details below.
There are lots of examples of well performing sites/niches where similar has happened.
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU05/20190716/109793/HHRG...
The end result of the algorithmically generated SEO spam which Google keeps indexing is that fewer people in enterprise environments will ultimately jump through the hoops to change their default search engine in edge.
I wrote a humorous little article about it and why they were wrong https://medium.com/luminasticity/artificial-stupidity-and-th... (sourcing lyrics through third party, returned Lennon's original draft lyrics)
But really I think the day that Google is the best search engine for the normal person are gone because Google will return stuff authoritatively that is wrong.
The normal person is by definition not a subject matter expert and cannot know if what they got from a search is wrong without further research.
Google wins. Even if it didn't, at this point DDG would have to be a lot better for the average person to switch (with that name, especially)...it just isn't.
HN is such an echo chamber with this that sometimes you might forget that Google is the best search engine for a normal person. Maybe they will footgun it with AI, though.