Google has turned into a cesspool. Half the time I find myself having to do ridiculous search contortions to get somewhat useful results - appending site: .edu or .gov to search strings, searching by time periods to eliminate new "articles" that have been SEOed to the hilt, or taking out yelp and other chronic abusers that hijack local business results.
Yes, I clicked the link because it exactly referenced my issue. But it's not helpful to just see the same 5 tips copy pasted from elsewhere by an algorithm.
Why? Google makes money from advertisements either way, it's not in their interest to improve search results. If anything, terrible search results make users more likely to click on ads, which now look better by comparison.
Users may be entrenched in other Google products-- Gmail, gcal, docs, etc-- but not search. Someone using all those other Google products could change their default search engine and have zero impact on the rest of their digital life.
I'm shopping around for a preferred alternative right now, I just haven't settled yet.
Do you think we're in the same situation now as we were fully 20 years ago? I don't. Facebook killed MySpace, but Facebook is now too big to be disrupted, same with Google. The word "google" is a verb now. This is why the quality of their search results doesn't matter, people are too entrenched to switch now, which was not true in 2001.
In that respect, not much has changed in 20 years. Switching your search bar is a very low friction activity, and if quality of results is too low then people will look elsewhere. There's only so many times someone will tolerate seeing the exact same copy/paste useless answers to questions as most of the first page of results.
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In General:
The tech industry is filled with examples of companies that had an entrenched product end up failing very rapidly. I think Google probably understands this well enough to ensure search quality remains better than a scrappy under funded startup can accomplish, but then again Google achieved search dominance by coming up with a different way to determine results, relevancy, etc. There's no reason to believe that someone couldn't come up with something superior now either.
I think the most significant threat to that possibility is 1) FAANG companies buying up many of the most talented people. 2) If a competitor did come along, buying them up as well.
But it's also hard to predict the anti-trust future. Microsoft had an extremely long run as the most dominant web browser for longer than Chrome has held that crown, but they got knocked down very quickly. I doubt that would have happened as easily if not for their anti-trust issues. Of course it doesn't help that IE grew into a slow bloated mess, but in that respect, refer back to what I said about search quality: Microsoft was entrenched, if sliding, in the browser space even after its anti trust issues, but it let it's quality slip too much for users to accept. Given viable options, users switched.
That switch was truly remarkable due to the much higher friction. IE still cam bundled with Windows, Chrome did not. Every home computer with Chrome requires a user to ignore the option right in front of them and choose Chrome instead. Now just think about how much easier it is to use a different search engine.
I'm not saying Google is doomed, but 20 years of market dominance guarantees nothing. The "big 3" US automakers owned the market for longer than Google's founders have been alive, but those days are now just another cautionary tale of poor quality and unassailable arrogance.