Then they're doing it backwards. Google first built a far superior product, then pursued all the tricks to maintain their monopoly. OpenAI at best has the illusion of a superior product, and even that is a stretch.

Google was by far the best product. Maybe an LLM provider will emerge in that way, but it seems they are all very similar in capability right now.

I don't believe google won the search engine wars because they had the best product, while it may be true, the won because the of the tools they provided to their users. Email, cloud storage, docs/sheets/drive, Chrome, etc

They were already pretty dominant in search by the time they released most if not all of those. They got into that position by being the better search engine - better results and nicer to use (clean design, faster loading times).

They had already won the search engine wars well before any of those additional products existed.