Google has spent the last 10 years ago making Google worse. They achieved this in large part by making the whole Internet worse [0], but a search engine with results of the quality of Google 10 years ago would be a serious competitor.
[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.
[0] For example, Google used to have a fairly strictly enforced rule that indexable content had to actually be visible to an unauthenticated user. The current crop of sites that have apparently useful content in snippets but that hide it when loaded would have been penalized, possibly severely.