Not even that, so long as Google is "good enough" and the better search engine is only a bit better.

One thing that might hurt a bit is if Apple launches a search engine that people are happy enough to use and makes it the default on OSX & iOS.

They don't have to launch a search engine, they just need to make DuckDuckGo (or Yahoo or Bing) the default.

If anything I think it would be the first. They are saying a lot about customer privacy lately, and DDG, as well as being an amazing search engine is all about user privacy.

I keep asking myself if the people who parrot the "nobody can beat Google in search" line have actually tried DDG.

I'm so old fart that I still remember days when Altavista was the king. Then came google. It wasn't that much better but the switch was easy - so I changed. And so did lots of other people.

This will happen with google at some point, someone will come up with something different and people will switch. Not because it's so much better but because it's so easy to switch. At that point Google becomes just one account place where people read their email, store their photos and so on.

If Google search loses a lot of market share, their profit margins will be impacted severely.

In that situation, anything that doesn't directly create revenue is fair game to be axed.