Maybe Google is popular because it used to be good. It was. Few monopolies ever weren't. (Or monopsonies either, for those who just can't help themselves.) It's the leveraging of past success into unassailable advantage (regardless of declines in actual value) that's at the heart of anti-trust. That is what Google has been accused of - not of being large or even dominant on the merits, but of using their market power to exclude potential rivals from a free market and therefore to harm consumers. Whether they're guilty will come out as the trial progresses. Reason is (characteristically) trying to short-circuit the process by spreading an inaccurate version of what the case is even about. The attribution of motive ("DOJ wants") and dogwhistles ("Europe!") only make it worse. It's disappointing that such a weak and hyper-partisan piece is even on HN.
When I am an actual customer, e.g. nexus/pixel devices, g-suite, google fi, google fiber, I tend to like their products.
But I have long since stopped using Google Search. I use Firefox as my browser. I'm slowly transitioning my @gmail.com to my own custom domain (still hosted at g-suite though. for now). They've killed off a number of products I've used over the years. Wave. Hangouts. Reader. And more.
Google could be a dozen or more companies and I'd be fine with it. In fact, I think it would be a good thing for it to be broken up along a few different lines.
I'm fine with gmail and search. But I was disatisfied with my Nexus and Pixel phones, due to quality and support and with my Google Assistance device, which didn't match my use cases as well as Alexa devices.
And I found good alternatives to Reader and I also switched to Microsoft 365.
Google offered custom domain support to individuals decades ago, and slowly pivoted that offering to become Google Workspace. Their systems don't differentiate between personal users with a custom domain and giant-ass corporations. As such, many Google products reject logins from custom domains until the offering is beefed-up to meet enterprise demands.
Music and Photos started this way, but eventually upgraded to allow custom domain accounts. Stadia was always gmail-only. Google One too. Home/Nest kind of works with a custom domain, but you can't share your devices with family members. There was a whole year there where it stopped allowing you to set reminders from a custom domain, and it still doesn't reliably work.
It's been a long time since I've set up a Google account - you might be able to use a non-gmail domain now and still be treated as a person (e.g. an iCloud user who wants to login to non-gmail Google products), but stay away from any sort of Workspace account as an individual.
Search engines such as Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search are surprisingly inaccurate outside of English-speaking countries. Bing is especially bad, as its local subsidiaries have been in business for decades but still use machine translation for their UI, which is full of unnatural translations. This makes me completely unwilling to use it. Therefore, despite many complaints about Google, the incentive to switch to other similar services is very low, as it would require giving up the ease of managing Google accounts and Gmail.
I've been experimenting with kagi.com search, which is a paid service. So far I am very happy with the search results. They also have responsive support on their discord.
For technical searches, Kagi was great. Usually more spot-on than Google, but not always.
For literally anything else, Kagi was not very good. Location-aware searches don't exist. Shopping results were also very bad. General searches (especially my favorite, site:Reddit.com searches) required several submissions and tweaks that Google didn't need.
I quit using it a few months ago. I will try it again in the future though.
I've been using it since March 2022. Right from the beginning the results were better, I didn't have to append my country to every search when I wanted a local business. It's not always that snappy though.
I've been using it for a year now. Google had been giving increasingly bad results. Kagi doesn't have adds and works surprisingly wel in my own language and location. Worth every cent.
That said, once upon a time, Google did things well. And every now and again they accidentally make a good product, get everyone using it, and then announce that you have a few weeks to rapidly migrate off of it because they're killing it off.
I guess their customers (the advertisers) like them well enough -- or at least know that they don't have much choice because they've killed a huge chunk of the competition.
It used to be good but once a company takes over the market it's much cheaper to dig its claws and build a moat than keep improving. Other search engines are as good. They all lost the war against SEO. Google is now so full of ads I'm reminded of Alta Vista.
Capitalism works best when there's regulatory pressure that stops a company from complacence.
Personally, I'm more concerned with Facebook. Social media is scary as hell, a massive experiment in human brain development with no regulation whatsoever.
