Every post about Google for years has been people saying it's terrible and dead.
Kagi gets talked about on here constantly, and it's not even on the list (though I suspect there's a reason?)
Even within Google, about a year ago, everyone was saying that Google was dead because of Perplexity, which is barely a blip.
It's kind of shocking to see DuckDuckGo is only about 1%, with everything you hear and how much you hear it within certain bubbles.
Not that I'd expect them high up on the list, but Kagi sends the following response header:
Referrer-Policy: same-origin
Not much, but each one of those deliberate & paid.
Compared to a year ago, Google has declined from 89.487% to 88.915%. Just half a percent, but IMO it will accelerate.
Meanwhile OpenAI has gone from 0.194% to 0.226% in just three months (they weren’t on previous quarter’s reports).
Sure, it’ll be years before Google drops to 50%. But it will happen.
It's not a charity, if people truly preferred Google results over defaults, Google wouldn't give out tens of billions of dollars to be the default.
It is a widely held belief that users don’t change the defaults, and I’m not asserting it’s wrong in general, but why doesn’t it apply to web browsers?
As an (unhappy) Windows user, I note that Microsoft pushes Edge aggressively, with each major Windows update “helpfully” offering to “optimize my computer” by making it the default browser again. However, Edge market share is only ~12% on desktop [0], despite the fact it is significantly more work to install Chrome than it is to change a mere default setting. Is that just because desktop users are more willing to jump through hoops?
[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
It also prominently advertised itself on the Google home page, which would probably cost many many billions of dollars if a non-Google browser wanted to do the same thing. On top of that, if you used another modern browser like Firefox, Google websites had popups that you should upgrade your outdated browser to Chrome.
Once Chrome on desktop was popular, then came the "oopses". [1] Accidentally breaking Google websites on non-Chrome browsers left and right.
After Android became popular, it's not hard to guess which browser they shipped by default on millions of devices. Device manufacturers weren't allowed to remove Chrome if they wanted to have working Google Play Services and access to the Google Play Store. I think recently in the EU manufacturers are allowed to remove Chrome and keep Play Services because Google got fined 4 billion euros.
[1]: https://www.zdnet.com/article/former-mozilla-exec-google-has...
Being at least 10€/month for the only "useful" tier is a powerful reason for that...
Maybe also Kagi being a metasearch engine reduces its visibility? Just speculating, I obviously don't know how it really works.
Fortunately, I have been able to join a family on sharesub and get "unlimited" for basically half the price. Actually, it's a great search engines, with lots of goodies. I really hope it gets more adoption.
They are terrible, but that doesn't mean anybody else is good or better. And being better at search isn't enough anyway [1]. Also, when you give Google less of your searches, personalization drops off and it gets even worse, but most people give all their searches to google so they see the benefit of personalization if they compare.
[1] When Yahoo did user research on search, one of their findings was that if you asked users which results were better, there was a strong and consistent preference towards results that were shown as Google results, regardless of the actual results. It's been forever since I saw those reports, so I don't remember the numbers, and the numbers are likely different today anyway, but that's a huge barrier to adoption that you have to manage.
Which do you think is more abundant, lies or truths?