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They can pay you lots of money to buy it off you, and then do what they want with it. Great for you, but (potentially) bad for all the prospective users. It also might be bad for all the users who would have kept using Google either way, since less competition allows Google to make a worse product (e.g., more ads).

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> They can pay you lots of money to buy it off you

Only if you have investors that can force you to sell. I know that “just bootstrap your own search engine lol” is not an answer, but I do think there's some middle ground.

If you're actually a threat to them and still think so, it just means they haven't offered you enough money. They'll keep doubling the offer until you (or your family) starts to question whether sticking to your product vision is worth forgoing a once-in-a-lifetime option to literally win at life with a single signature.

Why would a VC invest in a company if it knew its main avenue of getting a return was being cut off?

The return.

I'm not sure I follow. How does that relate to my comment?

The hypothetical search engine isn’t going to exist without investors who are expecting a return.

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