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.
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.
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.