[stevetodd]

Remember that you are the product and not the customer for these companies.

Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

[sanderjd]

But this argument still seems to rely on "monopoly position on search", when there are in fact a number of search engines.

[missedthecue]

And additionally, the switching cost for users to change search engines is literally zero. It takes all of 2 seconds and opening a new tab.

There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google owns a huge portion of search simply because they have the best product.