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.