Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going to Google for free.
Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different search engine:
You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do.
It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.
Why do you think Google is embedded into Chrome? I use ddg easily with chrome, and as far as I remember, chrome allows you to change your search engine to anything, even a nobody site, as oppposed to Safari, which only allows selection from a fixed list of 4 on my Mac, so I can't use Yandex as my default.
Desktop is dominated by windows, where bing search is embedded in the start menu, from where it is non trivial to remove it, and changing it to something else is not even possible.
How is there more friction on using another search engine on Android. What other platform has an even lower friction in switching search engines?
Google Search is pretty well embedded into Android. You can use Baidu or Yandex or Bing / DuckDuckGo on an Android phone, but there's substantially more friction. Considering mobile is now more than 50% of search traffic and Android is 80% of devices, that's close to 40% of all searches basically going to Google for free.
Combine that with the fact that Google is embedded into Chrome -- which is used by ~67% of web traffic -- and there's SOME friction to using a different search engine:
You have to set your default to a different search engine, or go directly to that page, rather than just type into your URL bar -- like most people do.
It's not hard to see that Google has a huge advantage.