Story

there are good reasons google handles 90% of search engine requests.

Bing+Yahoo has about 30%, while Google is staying under 65%. These guys do well because they have brand recognition, and because they pay-out huge sums of money to get their search engines used by default in browsers, phones, apps, etc., where people can't or just don't choose to change them. Obviously the smaller guys are at a huge disadvantage to attract eyeballs.

Meanwhile, the smaller guys actually return better search results, and have innovative ideas that are quite useful. Years ago, I switched to Clusty because the automatic categories listed in the sidebar made it extremely easy to narrow down searches with a click. DDG does a watered-down version of that, but also has often-useful instant answers at the top, so you don't have to click-through to anything at all. Clusty got worse, and got bought-out by some religious-right group. DDG continues to returns better search results, in part because it more aggressively filters out spammy sites that flood Google.

I will be eternally grateful to Google for massively improving on the worthless mess that was search engines. They single-handedly took the internet out of the cesspool, where searching for articles on Rhinos turned up porn and warez sites at the top of the list... But Google has been going in the wrong direction since then, and others have taken-up the torch and run with it.