How does this finding actually help consumers, in real life? They get to choose a search engine (spoiler alert: it will be Google), and life moves on. Except, smaller browser projects now miss on that default search revenue, potentially entrenching Chrome as the dominant browser.
It gives people room to try, especially now with new entrants like perplexity that might offer better results.
Google search went to shit and ruined most of the web with it, by creating an SEO industry that's 100% focused on optimizing for their ranking signals.
It would be a lot harder to do if the market had more viable competitors. In a world with 5-6 dominant options and a long tail of niche search engines you'd probably have options that penalize blog spam, aggregators like pinterest and sites with paywalls or millions of ads / affiliate links.
Yup. Google is king because it's the default, not because it's the best. Take away the bribed default position and suddenly better search engines stand a chance - and that's great for consumers.
With the recent LLM stuff, I'm not so sure. Maybe OpenAI will have searchGPT as an option. After all, for a mobile user interface that seems more appropriate since I'm not going to be banging out a complex query.
