Because of their “marketing/distribution investments,” not any product attributes [1].
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-29/google-se...
> When talking about revenue, we could mostly ignore the demand side of the equation (users and queries) and only focus on supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales. Sure, we had to build the best product, made smart marketing/distribution investments to get our product everywhere, but we could essentially tear the economics textbook in half.
They explicitly mention "we had to build the best product", so I'm not sure where you're getting the "not any product attributes" bit from. (Your linked article is paywalled.)
But to them, "the best product" is the one that maximizes their profits from ads, not the one that does the best job of giving users what they want. Obviously there is overlap between these, but they're not the same thing.
Perhaps, but Google's actual behavior makes it clear that, whether they want to admit it or not, Google's executives are not using the terms that way.
To me this shows how disconnected from reality Google's executives are. They think advertising is just the "supply" side and that they can ignore the "demand" side entirely. In fact, since advertisers are Google's customers, Google is the supply side--they supply the advertising opportunities--and the advertisers are the demand side--they pay for the advertising opportunities that are available. Users are neither supply nor demand to Google, economically speaking: they are a capital resource that Google uses to produce what they supply to their customers.
In other words, the complacent position Google's executives feel themselves to be in is not because they are somehow avoiding supply and demand economics: it is because, due to their first-mover position in search, they have a huge capital resource--all the users who use Google search because it was the first good enough search engine available and force of habit is very strong--which their search competitors do not have. But that resource is not unassailable. Google's search experience has been deteriorating because of ads. But Google's executives don't even see that. They think their search team is doing an awesome job.
No, that still doesn't make them customers. It makes them a capital resource that Google does not have complete control over. Which is something I'm not sure Google's executives fully grasp.
It is true that there can be customer relationships, in the economic sense, even if the value exchanged is not money on either side of the relationship. But in a customer relationship, the value exchange choice is voluntary on both sides. That is not true in the case of Google and its users; Google's value exchange choices are voluntary (it decides how its search service works and what ads to show the user, and what data to harvest from user interactions), but many user choices are not (users can choose whether or not to use Google search and what terms to search for, but they cannot choose what ads they get shown or what data Google harvests from their search activity).
I’ve been using DDG for a few years. I don’t even remember why I started using it. So far the results from DDG have been “good enough” that I’ve never felt the need to switch to Google, even for a single search. If DDG was the default search engine in people’s browsers, I wonder how many would just use it instead of changing to google.