It wasn't just the search that was amazing. You would go to google.com and be presented with only a Google logo, 1 line input box, and 2 buttons.

No portal, no news, no header, no login, no advertise with us, no punching monkeys.

It was a refreshingly different take on the web at the time.

Yes but without Chrome, Google wouldn't have 90% search market share that they have today. They are completely dominating the WWW industry.

I'm not convinced; early on they actually had a better product with better UI and better search results.

Google won the search market on merit but they've maintained it with Chrome. Google search has been garbage for a long time and in the last few years it's gotten bad enough that even laymen are noticing it.

Yeah. I have no data but my gut says, if anything, they couldn’t have gotten this bad at search without Chrome.

Surely making deals with companies like Apple and Mozilla to be the default search engine was a big part of building that market share. How many iPhone users bother to set a different search engine in Safari?

How easy is it to set a different search engine in Safari (apart from a very few predefined options)? =)

Is that true? I seem to remember Google dominating search all the way back in 2010 (before Chrome really caught on).

We all agree Google-the-search-engine is losing relevance (literally). So they should also lose their distribution channel, Chrome, because being nagged until you synchronize your Chrome profile and use their search engine is anti-competitive, on top of being pretentious from a less-relevant search engine.

That’s how I feel about Yandex lately. When it’s a struggle to find something on the common search engines, Yandex works like magic.

It’s not that Yandex is particularly better in any way, it just chooses to not filter the content one is looking for.

According to wikipedia.

Headquarters: Moscow, Russia

Genuine question, what is the concern about a Russian search engine?

Every argument I can think of is just worse with Google (spying, propaganda, censorship, security etc).

It depends on the region.

My neibhours never heard about the need to “denazify” us from Google’s home government.

War is much much worse than google. (Btw. Kagi is nice alternative, where you are the customer, not the product)

> what is the concern

Additional inteligence channel for their three letter agencies.

When somebody asks Yandex for data, decision making is done in such environment: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspicious_deaths_of_notable...

(such environment also suggests how accountable are the people requesting said data)

> My neibhours never heard about the need to “denazify” us from Google’s home government.

Plenty of people think Trump is "literally" Hitler... Maybe your neighbors don't think that, but plenty of people do.

Not 100% sure, but I think they might have meant Ukraine when they said “us”

The poster was referring to Google's home government, which is the US.