It was amazing.
Today it’s pretty terrible for me. I’ve switched to Kagi.
But Google has a MASSIVE advantage. They have the most used browser (they push the hell out of it). They get the most search traffic, so they can use that to tune results better than anyone (if they want). Thats part of how they took off so fast. Got so good. The rich get richer.
And everyone knows Google is #1 by 1000 miles. So that’s the engine they want to be in. That’s whose advice they follow.
Google gets the searches so it can get better faster. It gets the eyeballs to make the money to invest in other Google stuff. All of it pushes Chrome, which pushes Google Search.
Google is not the best. Google years ago was. They’re a shadow of their former self, destroyed by spam of their creation and AI slop they’ve helped make.
They’re still THE default. But as they say, “past performance is not an indicator of future success“.