>Google has maintained this monopoly, the government alleges, not by making a better product, but by locking down everywhere that consumers might be able to find a different search engine option, and making sure they only see Google.

Google improves search every year. Internally they have data to back this up. Google doesn't lock down everywhere consumers can learn about a new browser. The most notable being the default search engine on Windows is Bing. I have also seen ads for other search engines and discussion about search engines on social media.It isn't like you say the word Bing on the internet and you get contacted by Google's lawyers with a C&D.

>To understand why this case makes sense, look no further than the experience of Neeva, a search engine whose quality was as high or higher than that of Google, but died a few months ago because it just couldn’t get access to customers.

Better technology does not necessarily mean that you will have the better business. There are other reasons that you can fail. The link about Neeva having better quality actually states the opposite: "Neeva ended up building a search engine they were proud of, a search engine that came close to beating Google both by Neeva’s internal metrics and in user studies."