A look at search engines with their own indexes (2021)
I think a big part of why Google has such sticking power is that on the one hand they actually are pretty good at some things (even though they visibly flounder with others), but web browsers are heavily designed around leveraging the particular tasks Google is really good at.This is manifested by turning the URL bar into a search bar by default, making URLs difficult to manually edit (especially on mobile), making bookmarks inaccessible and difficult to manage by requiring multiple clicks to access, and having an interface that makes it easy to accidentally bookmark the wrong websites. I don't believe there's some big conspiracy where Google has orchestrated this, but it's probably more like an effort for every web browser to mimic Chrome without realizing why that has problematic knock-on effects.I really sort of wish there were good alternative web browsers that weren't ostensibly waging war on user agency, or at least gave more than token customization abilities.