[frb]

I don’t think that most people care about using Google or quality of search results at all.

I’d agree that the average HN user and certain professions like developers do care. I tried them all, kept switching back to Google and recently stuck with Kagi.

If I look at average not-so-technical users, they just enter words into their browser’s navigation/search bar and are happy to get useful results.

It’s worth to remember that Google is the default search engine in most common browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox).

Recently my wife, a typical Mac and Chrome user, got a new Windows computer from work. She didn’t notice that she was using Edge and Bing as browser and search engine until I once looked at her screen and commented on it. She shrugged it off as unimportant and keeps on using it, even though she could change the browser as well as the search engine.

[gnyman]

I had a similar experience with trying to switch a few times during the last few years and only within the last few months I've actually managed to keep using another search engine for more than a week, and it happened to be kagi.

If this is because Google has gotten worse or Kagi is better I can't tell, but either way I think we are at a point where Googles dominance is threatened for the first time, at last from my sample of one.

But there are other signals like how many of these "google isn't good anymore" posts we see on HN nowadays and the above example of a user not even noticing they aren't using Google.