The business of Google and Bing is not providing searches in exchange for fees (that is a tiny tiny part of their business) but rather advertising. And there is for sure network effects for ad networks. Advertisers wanna advertise on the platform that has more eyeballs. Why are Google ads selling at a premium vs Bing Ads? Because more advertisers wanna use Google Ads because that is where 90% of search traffic is. If I start my own search engine with a 1000 users per day no one is going to buy ads for that search engine.
Of course one could say that search should not be a free service (paid by ads) and instead everyone should just pay for a search engine like Kagi. But that is not the reality we live in.
The business of Google and Bing is not providing searches in exchange for fees (that is a tiny tiny part of their business) but rather advertising. And there is for sure network effects for ad networks. Advertisers wanna advertise on the platform that has more eyeballs. Why are Google ads selling at a premium vs Bing Ads? Because more advertisers wanna use Google Ads because that is where 90% of search traffic is. If I start my own search engine with a 1000 users per day no one is going to buy ads for that search engine.
Of course one could say that search should not be a free service (paid by ads) and instead everyone should just pay for a search engine like Kagi. But that is not the reality we live in.