Because the market is stupid. Worse is better, planned obsolescence, clickbait, fast fashion; the free market is full of failures. It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete.
Your argument is perhaps unintentionally implying that WP Engine's offering is 10x better. WP Engine is the competitor. It's ridiculous to suggest WordPress.com wouldn't be the default, obvious choice for hosted/managed WordPress.
Put in B2B terms, this is as if AWS only sold managed ElasticSearch and they did it well enough that it forced Elastic to change their licensing (as happened in real life). But of course, WordPress can't change their license because it's too ubiquitous and doing so would be an obvious, massive backfire.
If WordPress.com was truly competitive, this whole issue wouldn't even be a discussion. It's middling and expensive. And Mullenweg is upset that people are willing to pay for essentially Lightsail-but-it's-just-WordPress over his own offering.
> "It's not good enough for a competitor to Google's search engine to be 30% better, it needs to be 10x better in order to compete."
This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Competition may win on some non-functional requirements, such as privacy (hardly), or UI controls (e.g., silencing certain domains), but that pales in comparison with Google's local search results. And most competition people talk about are just shells around Bing. There are very few independent, general purpose search engines, i.e., Yandex, Baidu, Brave Search. And Google is still the best.
And yes, Google's index has been going to shit, due to all the SEO spam and the content farms, but so has everyone else.
You made an assertion. Show me the Google competitor that's 30% better and you may have a point. There are none, so the market may be more rational than you give it credit for ;-)
> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.
> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.
Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.
> how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
The tracking javascript, if you have it enabled, undoubtedly looks at the links on the search results page you clicked. If you search, go to the first result, and immediately bounce back to the page and try the second result, the first result gets down-ranked.
> how could [Google] know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?
They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.
Kagi is better at searching internationally or maybe nationally, but local search is still dominated by Google. Looking for bars, restaurants, corner shops, grocerers and such is Google territory in my experience.
We must live in a different world because for me, Bing's results have always been completely unusable. As a consequence, DuckDuckGo's results as well, although I understand that it must work for certain types of users located in certain countries; otherwise I can't understand how anyone would use it.
I just logged into Kagi, and searched for “restaurants”. Kagi can see my country because their UI says so, yet it gave me “top 10 restaurants in Groningen Province” (Netherlands), as the first result and the second result was “top 10 restaurants in Barcelona”. And I don't live in the Netherlands or Spain.
I also searched for a programming question, an issue I recently had, with the query “slick breaks binary compatibility”. Google gave me fresh discussions describing the issue, whereas Kagi gave me a GitHub issue from 2021 that described issues with the previous major version.
I did not cherry-pick these searches.
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Speaking of, Kagi doesn't have their own index, they just use Bing's API, enhanced with results from other sources, much like what DuckDuckGo does; and like DDG they tend to be disingenuous about it.
Conversely, I often find Google's local focus to be counter-productive when I want to search for the most relevant sources in the world (for physical things) or on the internet (for virtual things) and Google insists on giving me local examples of the physical thing or local providers of the virtual thing, neither of which I have interest in.
Better in what way? Better at not abusing your identity and private information to make bank arbitraging a monopolized ad market they own both sides of?
In this case the market is not stupid. WordPress.com's managed offering is limited enough that most web developers make valid recommendations to avoid it. Wpengine works a lot more the way a WordPress user wants it.
To be honest forget being better, if there's a Google competitor even on-par with Google, I'd switch to that immediately and never use Google or any of their services again.
Though it's just me of course, can't say the same of the masses.
