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How is Google entrenched in search? It's entirely feasible to build a competitive product and there are a few out there. Nothing locks their users in. Switching is no technical trouble, nothing needs to be relearned, and there's no risk.

Android weakly complements search, by making it the default, but it's still easy to switch if one actually cares. And they don't have complete control of the platform.

Really, they are just running on brand recognition from being uncontested for so long, and arguably still. That's not a moat, that's just a really nice castle.

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I have spent the last month testing DuckDuckGo as an alternative to having Google as a default search engine.

While I am hugely impressed with the quality of search a one man company can get, I am not impressed with DuckDuckGos results compared to Googles. It works okay for many searches but it sucks a really long-tail queries and its "zero click" information thingy has serious problems distinguishing between the relevant results when more than one is potentially relevant (search for "black swan". The most likely result, the recent movie, isn't even listed though an ancient one from 1942 is or search for "castle" which would normally give the time and tv-station that program is one, except it confuse it with some BBC documentary).

It's not just the search, it's the search with the economic model. The network effect and the volume that gives Google a castle. I can take a crawler, indexer and server and have a competitor up tomorrow. But I don't have cheap bandwidth (Google has datacenters in most countries, giving them a cost advantage, local traffic only), a scalable infra, and the advertising network.

I'd argue that it's not search at all. It's ads. If you make things free, then your competitors have to also bring their prices down or remove all cost. To then pay for their service, or augment their revenue, they need ads. Which Google can provide --- possibly at a greater monetary value, with better tools, and farther reach than any other ad provider.

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