No mystery. Even with all their miscellaneous products, 95% of their userbase is still people searching things. And they have the best search engine by far.Googles oversteps haven't seemed to make much of a dent in their usership.
The google search engine is not that good. They artificially boost their result page by listing the same webpage in various version.
You seems to have 100% more result in Google, most of them are the same shit. But yeah in a sense it is better: it's tailor made for YOU. They have enough data to know what you may want to search. It's a "bad" good feature, you'll never have to discover real new thing. Tailor-made is a fuel for laziness.
No one on earth cares how many results they get on google. They care about the first five or ten, and google consistently gives the right first five or ten. Who actually uses google to discover "new things"? I do use google scholar for that occasionally.
for me, google is about getting to what i want quickly. it works for me because 99.9% of the time, what i want is the top result. the reality is that discovery and creativity aren't going to be found by a machine, that's what places like this (and more importantly, the real world) are for. just my two cents...