> Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.

I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).