Considering Google to be a search engine is like considering Amazon a retailer. Ninety-nine percent of the people you ask on the street would choose those as the most valuable asset of the company.

Back during the early 1980's I stumbled across AutoCAD (a computer aided design software package, Autodesk's main application, which is now the industry standard for architects and some engineering disciplines. I immediately recognized its potential (owning both an electrical engineering/contracting firm and a personal computer oriented reseller). Well, we had a single-digit reseller number and became the first Autodesk reseller in Manhattan. AutoCAD, and the hardware systems that wrapped around it, quickly became a significant portion of our business - and the firm was very obviously associated with it in the technical fields, which used it.

Our relationship with Autodesk flourished for about two decades, but during that time the rest of the firm grew large enough that, when we parted ways (due to Autodesk's insistence that their resellers give up their other business "distractions" and concentrate solely on selling/supporting their software), my pain was mostly psychological - as the loss of their business didn't ripple the water much from the standpoint of the overall business.

Google's wealth is the immense amount of data collected by years of owning the default search engine, one of the major browser owners, the default non-Apple mobile phone operating system and so on. They are a major player in AI, autonomous vehicles and a vast array of other nerdy stuff.

Incidentally, while I use a number of AI's (mainly for research purposes), Google's is one of them - and does pretty well for my usual needs.

While it would, no doubt, hurt Google if their search engine lost relevance more than my loss of a vendor relationship, I suspect, rather than have it lose relevance, they will try to keep pace with their competitors.

Jeff