Are competing search indexes (Bing, Ecosia/Qwant, etc) objectively worse in significant ways, or is Google just so entrenched that people don't want to "risk it" with another provider (and/or preferences and/or inertia).

I suppose I'm asking whether this is actually a _good thing_ in that it will stimulate competition in the space, or if it's just a case that Google's index is now too good for anyone to reasonably catch up at this point.

The beauty about Google Programmable Search across the entire web is that it's free and users can make money by linking it their Adsense account.

Bing charge per query for the average user. Ecosia and Qwant use Bing to power their results, probably under some type of license, which results in them paying much less per query than a normal user.

Bing recently shut down their API product, which was already very expensive.

If you want programmatic access to search results there aren't really many options left.

I can manage fine with other search indexes for English language searches; weather that is because others got better or google got worse i cannot tell, though I suspect the latter.

But for searching in more niche languages google is usually the only decent option and I have little hope that others will ever reach the scale where they could compete.

Bing's index is smaller than Google's, and anecdotally I get fewer relevant results when using it, particularly from sites like Reddit that have exclusive search deals with Google.

Yes, for non English queries they are all rubbish. And that's billions of users.