Is this actually true?
Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.
The company I currently work at is 95% Bing users because they all use Edge and Bing is the default.
It's a medium sized company of normal non techie people.
The default matters.
Since W11 I've seen much more _normies_ use Edge and the result is that they are using Bing for their searches.
On the other hand, Google is the default on Android's Chrome and iOS' Safari, so they use Google there.
Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.
Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.
While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.
But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.
Yes and no.
Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.
No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.
Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.
I mean Google obviously thinks it is otherwise they wouldn't be paying Apple $20 billion a year.