Except there is another. It's called Chinese Google also know as Alibaba. And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade. Just give it time, Splinternet will happen and then each country will have its own Google.
>And with EU regulations coming up I suspect another one will rise in Europe as well in next decade.
lol, what?! Just because Europe loves to regulate itself to death so that the useless politicians can justify their salaries doesn't mean that will produce successful software companies. That's not how innovation works.
Just look at Russia, who despite having less wealth than the EU, has managed to produce its own Google in the form of Yandex. The EU has no Google of its own.
If we could have made our own Google we would have done it already, without regulations. But we can't. I mean, we could do it if we would put our minds and money to it just like we did with Concorde or Airbus but we're too cheap and ignorant to do it when we could just use and work for the OG Google from across the pond.
Increasing regulation in tech will only benefit the huge and bloated big consultancy corps and no way help with innovation.
I'm inclined to think that in order for another search engine to thrive, there needs to be a segregated market created by a different language. The kind that creates a culture gap that can't be bridged easily.
Ex - Google dominates the English-language web primarily. Most Europeans, esp Western Europeans, while they may have their own languages, speak enough English that they can get good results from Google, enough better than any local competitor that they can't get a foothold easily. Thus, they tend to use Google, enough to help Google get pretty good results in their own language too. Russian, though, has a ton of native speakers who speak no English. It makes more sense for them to gravitate towards a search engine where Russian is a first-class citizen, for searching the Russian web. All of the energy from the Russian-sphere thus tends to go to that engine, and Google's presence gets neglected and gets worse. Ditto Chinese, etc.
Here's where you're wrong: Yandex is not just a search engine, it's the fifth largest search engine in the world(!) and is also an email provider, a social network service, a payment service provider, a smart assistant, a ride sharing service, a cloud provider, a ML/AI and autonomous vehicle researcher, a V.C. fund. Basically most if not all of what Google/FAANG is doing.
Which European company does all those things and at such a large scale? Having some random small search engines that nobody is using, funded and kept alive by EU grants just to show that "we can", is in no way comparable to the scale of Yandex.
It's not so much "regulation vs non-regulation". Yandex is all intertwined with the government, and the Chinese giants have benefitted from a lot of government protection.
It's about political will. Like you say, Concorde, Airbus, or other government-sponsored and national-security-driven projects have succeeded. China and Russia saw their web properties the same way, while Europe has opted to not do that in the consumer web space, so the default is everyone just uses Google and FB.
