This might be the biggest threat to Google search (apart from OS vendors changing defaults) in a long long time. One problem Google faces is that they have to make money via search. Several other products are subsidized via search, so taking a hit on search revenue itself is out of the question. Compared to Microsoft which makes money on other stuff, search (and knowledge discovery) is more like a complement, on which they can easily operate on near break even point for a very long time (maybe even make it a loss leader).

If Google had to launch something similar to New Bing to general availability, the cost of search for sure would go up and margins will go down. Is the google organisational hierarchy even setup to handle a hit on search margins? AFAIK search prints money and supports several other loss making products. Even GCP was not turning a profit last I checked.