I'd rather not have judges make completely subjective statements like that.

I wonder which others he has tried to get to that conclusion, and how recently.

There was a time when that statement would have had some credibility.

Search engine quality in the United States is determined by 60-80 year olds who have only ever used Google to search for "lexisnexis.com"

Mehta said the tech giant has built “the industry’s highest quality search engine”.

This is not wrong. They have done this, in the past. And since then, it has taken a nose dive.

A US judge will say whatever he's paid to say.

What metric is the judge using lol

WTF... Is this the same judge who made anti trust ruling planting seed to be over turned?

"quality"="gets me the answer I'm looking for, if it exists, and as quickly as possible". Regardless of whether I was making a simple nav query or trying to figure out what an error message from some obscure piece of obsolete software really means. No other metrics need apply.

Unfortunately, Google still has the largest database of pages indexed, even if its frontend sucks like an industrial shopvac. So it can sometimes answer questions that engines using other databases as backing can't, even if locating that answer is like fighting back a horde of zombies with a paring knife.

When the name becomes synonymous with the service.

I'll Google it to make sure this is accurate.

That judge just wants to get on their lobbyist payroll

I'd give that to brave search at this point.

I get reliably more accurate search results with Brave Search tbh. It has a neat little AI summariser tool you can disable, an option to pay $3 a month to go ad-free, it's privacy-centric, clean design, browser-agnostic. Also, it uses its own indexer/web crawler, it doesn't just piggyback on Bing like DuckDuckGo does.

The only time I end up using Google is if I'm looking into a very recent event, like a thing happening in the world that took place in the last 12-24 hours or so. Google seems to index news articles quicker than Brave.