[silisili]

Picking on Google here, their most valuable part by far is injecting ads into search. Most agree their search is nothing special, getting worse even. We've seen tens of companies write good enough search engines. You could write one 10x better tomorrow and still likely fail. Their code is not the secret sauce - their user lock in is.

A lot of the same could be said for FB.

[konschubert]

If google’s search is nothing special, why are all other search engines worse, including yours?

[subtra3t]

I agree with you but at the same time I can see why you were downvoted. No need to be so rude.

But I feel that it's incorrect to dismiss Google as being a bad search engine. DDG and Brave both provide !bangs for google and many other search engines that a significant part of their userbase use regularly. I myself use google often when I'm searching for something extremely specific, something that Google may give me 2-3 relevant search results for. Other search engines would often not give me anything relevant at all.

[marginalia_nu]

A big part is that they have access to an enormous amount of click data and user data. This not only from being the dominant search engine, but also from sources like Chrome.

[nrabulinski]

At least a few search engines are either equally good or better. Kagi immediately comes to mind, but there have been others posted on HN over the years as well

[amadeuspagel]

This post has nothing to do with my comment or the broader discussion.