Is Google loosing ground?

Google's absolute dominance as a search engine has continued in 2020, with a market share of over 91% worldwide and over 87% in the US.
(source)

But with ongoing criticism of Google's privacy and censorship practices and recent antitrust lawsuits, the Google search engine is already losing market share to a competitor.

The DuckDuckGo search engine increased its traffic by 62% in 2020. (source)

In the U.S., DuckDuckGo increased its market share from 1.3% at the end of 2019 to 2.3% at the end of 2020, while Google lost almost 1% in the same period. (source)

A major criticism of Google's practice concerns the blacklisting of certain pages and the manipulation of search results to ensure that they are not findable or only poorly findable. This concerns not only obviously illegal content, e.g. in connection with copyright infringements, but also conservative news sites, among others. (source)

An internal Google document from 2018 titled "The Good Censor" gives some insights.

It argues that Google is caught between two opposing viewpoints, the Internet as an "unmediated marketplace of ideas" on the one hand "well-ordered spaces for safety and civility" on the other.
"But tech firms have gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and toward censorship and moderation," it states.

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"The principle of free speech is not concerned with the content of a man's speech and does not protect only the expression of good ideas, but all ideas. If it were otherwise, who would determine which ideas are good and which are forbidden? The government? " (Ayn Rand)

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