>Imagine if someone comes along and takes away Google's search business? At this point, their results are such a trash fire it can't be that hard.

This is not going to happen unless antitrust regulators deal with what reinforces Google's search market share: the distribution they buy with TAC (e.g Safari and Firefox) and what they get for free (Chrome) and close to free (Android).

The antitrust remedy should be to separate Chrome and Android from Google and place a ban for some amount of time where they can't buy being the default.

Tech people might have switched to Google because it was legitimately better than the competition, but you're still living in 2000 if you think that's how Google got big. There's a reason why the CEO of Google is someone who was responsible for building the moat around Search (Google Toolbar and Chrome).