Just keep paying to roll the dice again and see if you land a business as profitable as search+ads. Again, and again.

There was an arguably "better" rationale given for paying out engineers to play hard on the chance they land a success . . .

The denial of those engineering talents to competitors.

Tried many different search engines and none was as good as Googles until I tried Brave search, something I really didn’t expect. We will see what happens with Googles search business in the coming decade.

Brave search is quite good and the support for DDG's bangs is icing on the cake.

Yandex also gives a different perspective on the same queries.

I suppose the benefit of being a niche player in search is you don't have to deal with targeted SEO.

inderd the entire post appears to be trying to rationalise and explain away objective failure of leadership