There are other search engines, they've just been marginalised. Even something as mainstream as Bing has been pushed to the side.

Because of the financial incentives, it would still end up with people doing things to drive traffic to their website though, no? Maybe because the web was smaller, and people looked at it as means "to explore curiosity" in the olden days it kinda worked differently... maybe I just got old, but I don't want to believe that.

it's few orders of magnitude harder given the amount of SEO spam prevalent, and that just gonna get worse with AI