If users lose their trust in Google (as I have, FWIW), then it loses its eyeballs to sell.
Short-term-ism in terms of maximizing ads revenue which costs long-term goodwill is a serious negative for Google.
I'd argue that in the past year or three, the company has started showing its vulnerabilities. I'm not sure who will take over from it, or how, or what that company's business model will be, but I see vulnerabilities.
I switched to DDG a while ago as my "default" search. Unfortunately, Google does reliably provide better results. They'll maintain a user base as long as that's true; I still switch to them when DDG fails.
Well, it provides better results when it doesn't rewrite your search into oblivion in an attempt to save you from typos you didn't make. Unfortunately, DDG being worse at everything else still leaves Google in the lead. But it also still leaves me very unhappy when I search.
Usually it's turning an uncommon domain specific word into something uselessly common (and completely unrelated) for me.
Or when I put an entire error message in quotes and it deems the number of results for that error message too low to be intentional so it deconstructs it into a useless mashy search of all the words in the error. Note, I don't mean when the results are zero, but even then I usually have to spend an annoying amount of time before I realize that my search actually had zero results instead of the millions it claims it had.
There was a time when google's cleverness was just enough to be useful, but it gets more and more clever (and frustrating) every year now.
Convincing Google that I don't want its assumption that I want a typo fixed is getting more difficult.
The dynamic Google results page means that it's really difficult to refine a search based on the presently visible results which disappear as I update the search. I find that that behavior incredibly annoying, and greatly appreciate that DDG doesn't do this.
It took me two goes to make DDG stick but since June of last year (just after the Snowden revelations started) I've been using DDG as my primary and nearly exclusive search engine.
It's much better than the first time around: more relevant, faster, and very few technical hangups.
I still fall back to Google periodically, especially for:
• Date-bounded search. DDG doesn't support this.
• Specialty searches: news, books, scholar. I've also keyed up custom searches for a bunch of sites in my browser.
• Rarely: I don't seem to find what I'm looking for on DDG. Usually first an !sp re-search, if that fails, !g. About 2 times out of 3, I still don't find what I'm looking for and return to DDG for more refinement.
RSA maximized their profits up $10 million by selling their customers out to the NSA, and that cost them some serious long term goodwill and reputation. Were their shareholders happy about that piece of financial calculus?
Short-term-ism in terms of maximizing ads revenue which costs long-term goodwill is a serious negative for Google.
I'd argue that in the past year or three, the company has started showing its vulnerabilities. I'm not sure who will take over from it, or how, or what that company's business model will be, but I see vulnerabilities.