[miohtama]

The problem is not Google tweaking their algorithm causing large sites getting more traffic.

The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.

The problem is that Microsoft Bing never became a viable search engine.

With more diverse Internet, like it was 15 years ago, issues caused by one provider were inconvenience, not a death blow.

[hgs3]

Absolutely. Anyone who doubts Google killed web surfing should try the Marginalia search engine [1]. Unlike Google, Marginalia presents novel and interesting results.

[1] https://search.marginalia.nu/

[nomemory]

I use marginalia more to find blogs and explore personal sites. I think I visit the site daily.

Have you tried kagi?

[jamesrr39]

Is Bing not viable? It looks pretty ok to me. DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also lean pretty heavily on Bing and they work fine. If you know how to change your default search engine (and want to), you can pretty easily be Google-search-free nowadays.

Of course the problem is that most people just use the default search engine on their device, and Google has paid big money for being the default. And if you're not interested in tech, why would you bother setting up an alternative one?

> The problem is Google having 90% dominance on the search, without credible competition.

Certainly agree with this. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia :

> In January 2023, Ecosia handled 0.29% of European search requests, behind DuckDuckGo's 0.53%, Bing's 3.65%, and Google's 92.23%.

Pretty incredible market shares.

[Osiris]

In my experience it gives really bad results for anything remotely specific. If it's just general popular stuff it's fine. But when searching for a very narrowly scoped query, it just gives back generic popular results.

[apple4ever]

I've been using bing for over 10 years and it has always been consistently better than Google especially without Googles evilness.

[gentleman11]

Google basically just surfaces content marketing these days. It killed the blogosphere. Anybody who isn’t promoting their crap full time is invisible now, and so corporations basically generate almost the entirety of the content we get to see now

[madsbuch]

at this point you can not claim that there is no credible competition.

from my perspective the "issue" is that none of the competitors get traction. why would they? you either have to pay or change your habits.

Regardless, DMA, Gdpr, and friends will slowly level the playing field.