> then a competitor would have stomped google search into the dust already You'd think so, but they can't. Forget about Google's brand power due to which every

> then a competitor would have stomped google search into the dust already You'd think so, but they can't. Forget about Google's brand power due to which every internet user is hard-wired to turn to it when searching. The scale of users they have gives them a monopoly that allows them to collect a vast amount of data that no competitor can match. Without an quivalent amount of data, they just can't improve their engines. A simple example is the search queries - the keywords you use to search for data. I suspect Google gets roughly 1000 new search queries to every 1 new query their competitor gets. So Google has 1000+ new data points to optimise their search engine, where as a competitor is constrained due to the lack of similar data. That is why the competitors offer a poorer search experience with new queries. Which makes users stop using it and adds to woes of the non-Google search engine. The only fix to this is to recognize Google search engine as a monopoly, and force it to share its data with other competitors till they reach a certain level of threshold of "competitiveness". (Ofcourse, the biggest issue with this approach is the user privacy problem).