I say this as someone who has tried to switch away from google many times because I dislike google as a company : there is no better search engine out there. There hasn't been for as long as google has existed. Every time I make something like bing or yandex my default search engine I end up getting frustrated with a niche search and type google.com and after typing google.com too many times I get fed up and bring it back as default.

And the two competing search engines I mentioned are pretty much all there is. Other names like duckduckgo aren't real search engines, they are just a frontend for another search engine (DDG uses bing). There just isn't many out there willing to front the bill for crawling and indexing the whole web.

People trying to explain away google's success solely from a marketing standpoint are arguing from bad faith.