Thanks for the elaboration.

I think you would be right about the greater good being served by everyone being aligned on the same search engine ONLY IF we understood search engines so well that we knew there to be only one mathematically optimal way to build search engines.

Since we don't understand search engines that well, there is a LOT of value in the exploration over the space of search engines that these different companies represent.

The broken window fallacy argument is that those speaking of the benefits of the broken window are mistaking maintenance cost for generated value. That doesn't seem to be the case here. This is society implicitly investing in exploration over exploitation.