Granted, the power of the defaults is usually strongest in the context of random settings in a product that end users don't know anything about. Search engines are something most people know at least something about by now.

Consider DuckDuckGo, which sells itself on privacy, but after more than a decade has only 0.18% market share. Without the power to make it the default in an OS or browser, you'd have to have a really strong value proposition to convince people to switch.

If the hypothesis that Google is not better or indistinguishable from other search engines is true, then you'll be fine (or perhaps even better). But if it's not, then your whole business will have a drag force from that arbitrary friction (perhaps overcomable if the other parts of the business are great).

If you rise up with Google as the default search and then threaten to switch away when you are big, then your threat won't have teeth because you risk too much inherently by potentially disrupting the experience of your customer base.

Does it?

Imagine some alternate reality where Bing were the dominant search engine (or look at real world cases like Russia, where Yandex dominates), do you think that Google's marginally superior results would be enough to make users switch?

I propose that Google reached a market-leading position early on by being pretty good when other search engines were pretty bad. Since then, they've become the "default" option, and people will keep using what they're accustomed to.

For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket it? I think not.

Except for iPhones, there is suddenly a gatekeeper. If you don't convince Apple to add you to the list, it won't matter how good you are or how much people want to make you the default engine, as long as Apple says no, they can't.

The reality is that the barrier is very low. Blekko, DDG, bing, yahoo, and we can go back even farther and list more search engines. Nothing is stopping them other than their own engineering resources. Your entire argument is saying Google is better and out innovating the competitors so we should punish them.

Until Google's search results page for what you want to do decides to "promote" Google's own solution and "penalize" the competitor.

Which is something Google already does. They claim to have only the best and purest and most angelic of intentions, but the result is still strongly anti-competitive behavior and makes competing with Google a task that ranges from merely "obscenely difficult" all the way up to "actually impossible".

The feedback works like this: 1. Google is dominant and can outbid competitors. 2. Many (most?) users will not change default search provider so long as it is basically functional. 3. Google's competitors will only attract a minority of customers that realize they can change and decide to. 4. Google stays dominant and competition is stifled and with it any improvements.

As a user of alternate search engines, I am hurt because if 2 did not occur and people that did not care were distributed evenly then my search provider would have more revenue and would presumably hire more engineers to improve the service. Another competitor cannot capture that revenue from 2 simply because Google can always outbid them because of their dominance.

Of course, there are some number of people who would switch to Google if the default was Bing, but is it significantly different than the people switching now?

Clearly there are technology challenges (internet scale web crawler, indexer, search interface, ad technology) but these are not novel challenges anymore.

Funding is an issue as operating a general search index is likely very expensive with high upfront investment. Marginal costs are nearly zero as the major expense is likely fixed (crawling and indexing the internet) while variable costs are a small percentage (serving search results for each request).

Google, like Nike, Gucci, and Procter & Gamble, has spent billions to build their brand perception and cement the habit of using their products despite there often being minimal actual differences between competitive products.

But the critical one really does seem to be attracting new users. The history of DDG, ClickZ, Bing all seem to validate this. Just getting a user to _try_ a new search engine is very difficult despite it being "one click away." Certainly a deal with a browser maker / mobile manufacturer would aid this but it's priced amazingly out of the reach of competitors denying perhaps the most obvious way to get trials and traffic.

Google clearly knows this. How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.

The power of defaults, mostly.

The average user experience of picking up an internet-connected device has been very intentionally cultivated by Google. Whether you're in your browser or on your phone, Google's spent a lot of money building up Chrome as a browser ecosystem, Android on mobile, and paying off Apple on iPhones and competing browser vendors like Firefox, to guarantee that, whenever possible, Google is always the default search engine. The only non-Google default will typically be on Edge, which only has about 5-6% penetration. Since Google historically has always been the best search engine in the space, does not explicitly charge its users money, and (at least for average users) is really good at surfacing what they're looking for, most users feel no need to look elsewhere for a search engine because the default just works, switching would demand an effort, and Google is what they'd want anyways. The moat isn't big, but Google has put a ton of work into ensuing that any competing search engine requires an intentional and active choice of users to seek you out while they're worse.

At least until the recent AI play by Bing, this tiny moat was always sufficient, because if you start from scratch on search, you're essentially guaranteed to be worse, and all other 'serious' offerings under the hood were weak alternatives: essentially one of "Bing search API wrappers" (worse results), "nation-state-actor search engines" (for most users, worse results), or "Google, but with some cursory privacy measures, a subscription fee, or filtration features" (which wasn't something most users care about).

Recent chat AI represents a competing alternative to doing a search in the first place, which jeopardizes the "we have essentially all defaults and users can't be assed to switch to a worse search" barrier to entry that Google historically relies on, which is ringing alarm bells for them.

The only way I see this changing and people shifting to an alternative search engine is if that engine is 10x better in terms of results...

As other search engines catch up with Google on quality of results and usability, the relative switchover cost will become more significant.

So I don't think this is just about standards and performance, though obviously that is powerful too.

This is like if one company owned the street signs, and just took them down arbitrarily.

The gap between Google Search and any other Search competitor is way way way larger than say.. AWS and any other direct competitor.

In order for Google to be challenged on the Search front, I think it’ll require a fundamental change (in medium) in the way people prefer looking things up on the Internet. Which is obviously an incredibly difficult question.