"Somehow a homemade problem for Google."
Wow, I thought you were going to talk about selling ads and how that has made search shite.
Wow, I thought you were going to talk about selling ads and how that has made search shite.
They, themselves, sorta proved that a good product could become dominant with ads and without being shite.
The pre-AI enshitification-part where they realized that worse search-results means more searches so more ad-revenue is another story.
If they wouldn't have done that, they could be the proof that a well-maintained search-engine is still better than a LLM.
But now this will never happen, as no-one will be willing to give up that additional search revenue while overall usage is going down...