Comment by gcau

My understanding is that google lets anyone freely use chromium, and chrome is just their flavour of chromium with google services integrated ontop of it. Microsoft took chromium and sprinkled ai-enhanced microsoft flavours on top to make edge, which doesn't look like a monopoly. Presumably, microsoft is able to use windows to push edge, and use edge to push bing. If chrome was sold and had the google integration removed I would switch to a vanilla chromium.

I see some argument for google paying firefox to be the default search engine, but is that worse than firefox not existing at all?

In terms of search engines, I think there's just a lack of good competition. The search engines I'm aware of are:

Google: Just works. The only problem is you need to add "reddit" to most searches to get actual real, human-written non-seospam text, but I doubt that's unique to just google.

Bing: I'm greeted with an uncomfortably flashy layout shift, a page full of american news and some popup about AI. They also cover up and censor for the CCP.

Kagi: Their website is literally broken right now and I can't even see the pricing or other pages. I tried safari, chrome, firefox and edge, the hamburger menu doesn't open. Ultimately though, nobody except the kind of audience on HN is going to pay for it. If I told anyone else about a search engine that costs $16/month to use, I'm sure they'd think i'm joking, irregardless of how good it may be.

Yandex: Good for the reverse image searching, but otherwise probably not good to use.

Most of this article is ads, and it's paywalled so I can only read the first couple sentences, so if this is addressed in it I apologise.