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> No? Decreased search quality will reduce the number of searches people are doing which redcues the amount of ads Google can show.

I’m willing to bet that >90% of Google Search users aren’t even aware that alternatives exist.

They are not suddenly going to stop using Google Search. There might even be a significant short-term increase in usage, for example, if they really need to go to page 5 to find the first relevant result.

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>They are not suddenly going to stop using Google Search

They will use it less if it becomes a waste of time to try.

That is very far from my experience with non-tech people. My friends and students always google something, and almost inevitably fail to find it. Then they do it again, and again, and again.

Over two years now I see specifically two people deterministically failing to find stuff through G search, and yet they still start with it in an almost Pavlovian ritual. Sometimes they will desperately scroll down, click on a blatantly irrelevant result and switch to facebook or some other bookmark aggregator of theirs to continue their brutally inefficient search process, thumb flick after thumb flick after thumb flick.

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