The thesis that Google was only good because they didn’t face competition gets it completely backwards. There were tons of search engines when Google started, their dominance came from having a lightweight killer product, not the other way around.
Though their subsequent en-shittening has been in a relative competitive vacuum, really Bing sometimes with different front-ends.
I think today their main sticking power is how integrated they are. Not just with their browser, but the search engine with maps and what have you. Like if you build a search engine that just does internet search, users are confused why it can't tell them local restaurants' opening hours.
[1] http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf Appendix A
Also many of those search engines were are least partly focused on being a big curated directory of large/preferred sites.
In contrast, early-Google was amazing at bringing in the other stuff from small sites (and web-forums) that didn't have an advertising/marketing budget.
Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that. Now, if you want that, you have to spider. The moment you create that representation and make it available to anyone else for any level of financial gain, and it's all over.
...And given all the assholery of the typical scraper these days, yhe Web is increasingly having to do away with good faith serving to novel bots; because assholes gonna asshole.
Can't have noce things.
> Search engines/a publically traversable & reality reflecting of the physically accessible WWW is by design outlawed. DMCA saw to that.
Do you mean in the sense that the DMCA forces everyone to censor their data on demand, and therefore data cannot be both accurate (containing certain items) and public?
> Now, if you want that, you have to spider.
Isn't "that" already the same thing as "spidering"?
Or do you mean that "you" (i.e. the data consumer) have to do your own in-house spidering, because nobody is allowed to centralize the work and then redistribute (complete) data?
The problem is that the alternatives then looked like google right now.
It’s not that Google was created as a monopoly with no competition — there’s a neat little graph about what happened to Yahoo in there! It’s that the experience of using Google and the Google suite was at its peak in their clear & unchallenged market leader phase.
Source: am author
To me, it looks like Google achieved a market dominance because they had a great product, but quite quickly they began practising anti-competitive behaviours and before long the user experience began to degrade.