> "It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete."

This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best.

And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else.

You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)