I just read that Google has paid 120B for the last decade to be the default search engine on Apple devices. If Apple changes the default to Bing then people will just change it back to Google in the settings.
What’s the thinking behind giving Apple a ton of free money so they can have more resources for marketing and R&D and become even stronger competition for Android? iPhone is gaining more and more market share every year. Seems like Google wants to save their search business by sacrificing Android.
I suspect that they know that the average user won't actually change it back. Just like how, IIRC, Apple Maps is (or at least was as a few years ago) the most commonly used mapping software purely due to the reach of iphone's userbase
That's nice but I hate everything besides the maps. I don't want to click on a photo and be redirected to the app store to download yelp. I don't want curated lists, or city guides. And there is no way to hide this trash. It's cluttering the only thing I care about, the maps!
Apple Maps is actually competitive with Google Maps and has walled garden integrations so it's not really comparable to me as Google Search versus Bing/DDG/whatever. Not to say the other search options are so terrible people would definitely switch, more that's definitely not the case with maps.
Well the thinking by google has surely been that Apple Search (iSearch?) would be competitive if Apple percieved it would be in their interest to build it / work with another partner. It's not impossible that someone else would build a good / better tool. Since all these tools also significantly improve with use and feedback, switching the default would probably have a massive impact
It didn’t start that way though. It took a lot of time and money; version 1 was terrible by most accounts.
That being said Apple is a company with enough cash and time to throw at Search. People also said that it would be hard to break Google’s dominance of maps.
I guess that's why Apple's being called to witness - Google also throws a significant amount of cash at Apple over search, and Apple has not developed a search engine.
It's not the point, but I significantly prefer the Apple Maps turn-by-turn UI, especially now that they have cycling directions, and I notice no real difference in the quality of directions for my use.
After Apple Maps being awful for years I’ve finally switched to it. The last straw is all the paid locations on Google Maps, it looks like a giant ad now.
I originally switched to Apple Maps because Google Maps was a privacy nightmare, and the main thing I missed was "search along route". Apple Maps has something like it now, so I haven't missed Google Maps much. I also like that it buzzes my watch for upcoming turns, and can auto notify my wife when I'll navigate home (I'm sure Google has this too but I never noticed / used it on theirs before)
I think it makes more sense to view android as a cheap way to negotiate it down to only 120B from a lot more money over the last decade. Search ads for rich consumers are insanely profitable, more profitable to google than android has ever been.
You and I would change our search engine but most iPhone users need an apple-maps-level mess up to go switch from the defaults (and even then that’s stabilized to a majority apple share now). Bing+apple could have been an existential threat to them in the mobile era; without android they would’ve had to pay whatever apple wanted.
I wouldn't even change my search engine back. Google often sends me captchas while using a VPN, and sometimes somehow I end up stuck doing the captcha for 1+ min. So I've been using Bing for the last few weeks when that happens, and I haven't found the results worse than Google's.
I haven't, but I probably should. I just found it straightforward to type bing.com when blocked by Google and it was the first thing that came to mind.
And after seeing I wasn't blocked it has become my go-to in the last few weeks; I've ended up using it about 10 times in the last month.
> Google often sends me captchas while using a VPN.
Even Yandex.com has started to send me captchas. Once I encounter a captcha page I quickly switch over to bing or ddg. No time for the captcha bullshit.
That's their secret, Cap. Every other business unit in Google is a funnel back to the Advertising Money Printer Machine. Sure, if the business units make money, that's good to offset costs, but at the end of the day, if Google is paying $120B over 10 years to keep Google as the default search engine for Apple devices, they're making more than $120B over 10 years on Apple users.
Not to mention that Google can do first party ad injection on results to shift people towards Android, decreasing the cost per user for impressions and sucking more data out of them to again, fuel the ad machine.
I wouldn't be so sure of that....there are less filtered ways I encounter google's ad-laden results and that'd send me to Bing/Duck Duck Go poste-haste.
Apple is getting a 'crap free' google search results currently.
They are paying them not to develop a competitor search engine* and not to default include adblock, not to mess with cookies ect. That doesn't need to be in the agreement but it is obviously implied. "Would google still pay us $10 billion if we did X?" is enough to do it.
* or more accurately keep it in the development phase for almost a decade now.
a large number of people will just assume Apple now recommends Bing over Google for better search results, and leave it as Bing. in Apple we trust is the way a lot of Apple users operate
The irony here being that you’ve apparently been victim to “in Google we trust” and failed to notice that Bing and DDG are highly competitive with Google these days.
I’ve used DDG for years at this point and the number of times I’ve needed to drop back to Google has fallen to zero for the past few of them.
Sometimes I use the other searches just to see how different they are, and they are pretty good. There are less ads on DDg and brave which makes the experience at least a lot better.
I suspect that Google isn't paying Apple to have Google as the default engine, but it's to keep Apple from creating their own. Search is a huge business and Apple has a massive user share. They could cut into Google's search revenue if they made their own engine, and made it cleaner than Google.
People will state google has better search results than anything despite never having used anything else. People will go in and change it to Google but then again, anyone who wouldn't is probably the kind of person to use TikTok as a search engine (I have genuinely seen someone do this)
> People will state google has better search results than anything despite never having used anything else.
People will happily use the default search engine, no matter what it is, and believe that it's Google they're using, unless the search engine goes out of its way to tell the user that it's using something else.
People don't read error messages, people click away whatever gets in their way, people don't even notice logos.
It's far more likely that Apple launches their own search engine (which they're already working on) and displaces Google Search in the same way they displaced Google Maps.
Every standard mainstream app maybe, but not every app. FDroid is the best source of finding ones without, but also in the normal play store you will find big ones without. But yes, google is in the ads buisness, otherwise there would be a easy option to search apps without ads.
The agreement also prevents Apple from making its own search engine. I suspect if they did that and made it the default, lots of people wouldn't change it. Defaults are powerful.
> If Apple changes the default to Bing then people will just change it back to Google in the settings
This is the crux of the underlying legal theory that this case is exploring. If the above statement is true, then yes; Google has been just burning money, and "stupid waste" isn't an antitrust issue (though maybe their shareholders could file a lawsuit).
But the DOJ makes the case that Google doesn't see it that way, Apple doesn't see it that way, and users don't see it that way... That if Apple changed the default to Bing tomorrow, users are so under-informed about the way the web works that Microsoft and Google's search share would swing radically and immediately. There's meat on those bones; people (who aren't Extremely Online HN Users, like yours truly) seem to find the search engines interchangeable, which implies the default matters. A lot.
> people will just change it back to Google in the settings
No they wouldn‘t. A lot of testing and (probably?) research has shown that a massive amount of regular normie users will never change any defaults of any kind. Many would probably not even notice what search engine they‘re using. Defaults are incredibly powerful. They would easily accept a marginally worse product.
They are- puns are contentless parasites that only replicate memetically.
I never said they were hated by all, and my statement was in the context of a HN thread- obvious why such content is useless, even to the op themselves
I would guess no, they're not being forced into a revshare deal. They asked (or were offered) to be listed as an option, and they agreed to a revshare deal. I presume they could just say "no".
Yes, choosing who gets to be on that list is a problem that software other than iOS has as well. Are those lists typically pay to play? Does e.g. Microsoft pay for having Bing listed as an option in Chrome?
I remember when Android switched (in the EU) from having Google be the default search to having the users pick from a list during device setup. They initially proposed determining who gets to be on the list via an auction. Companies like Duck Duck Go were outraged, and demanded to be listed for free, and eventually Android went with listing the most popular search engines in each country.
Now it turns out that they've been paying Apple all this time, and not said a word. I guess it makes sense. Duck Duck Go cannot afford to speak against Apple for fear of retaliation, while Google is a punching bag they can hit for free PR any time they feel like it.
Apple does not have a search engine competing with DuckDuckGo, though, unlike Google. The whole point of it was to avoid antitrust rulings for referencing their own search engine. If they force other search providers to pay for placement, they would still be referencing their engine.
The two situations are not quite as similar as you are presenting them to be.
I was actually surprised that I can't do that when I switched to Kagi a few weeks ago, I thought adding a default search engine is table stakes at this point but was surprised to learn that on iOS you have to install Kagi's Safari extension to interject search queries somehow to get default search engine behaviour.
How many search options should Apple provide, and what criteria should they use to determine which ones to list? I wouldn’t want to have to pick from a list of 100 search options.
They should provide all of the search options and sort them by popularity. It doesn't matter if the list has ten billion elements if the ones everybody uses are at the top of the list.
No it wouldn't, anyone could still find it by searching for it in the list and they could use the money they'd otherwise pay to Apple for marketing, or spread through word of mouth. Then as soon as they had more than negligible market share they'd be on the first page of results.
Making it harder for new search engines to rise is the thing that happens now because you can't even be offered as an option unless you already have enough money to pay the danegeld.
What sort of marketing do you think would work better then paying Apple to be on a list of a few search engines? A billboard telling people to look for your search engine on a list of thousands?
The list of thousands is going to have a search bar. Why wouldn't a billboard work, or any other ordinary form of marketing? Isn't this how people install apps?
Do I have to choose between "but you don't have to buy them to be listed" and "it's too bad there isn't a competing app store to keep ad prices in check" or can I have both?
And that's good, that's why we have so much investment in browsers. Without that, every OS would have a browser just good enough not to make people switch to another OS, but not good enough to replace native apps.
Particularly relevant for this case:
> The only exception is Google – we don’t make money when you search with Google. However, we know that some of you use this search engine daily, so we include it in Vivaldi.
During initial setup, allowing product owners to choose what browser they want, whether its Safari, Chrome, or Firefox, with their respective browser engines, would be nice.
Apple's not on trial here. They're also on trial for the sorts of things you mentioned, as is FB.
It'll be interesting to see if the courts actually enforce the law, or if these cases get decided on political influence instead. Previous testimony in this case is pretty damning for Google, since it implies their ad business is built on multiple levels of fraud. That ought to be enough to get them to lose the case.
Time will tell. Happily, it's possible for all three of those players to be found guilty. It's not an either/or situation.
What fraud has been committed? I didn't see that in the article. It's been known for a very long time that Google paid Apple to be the default search engine. Long before this trial.
It's not weird at all, they're paying to reduce friction for users to use their product.
It's no different than Coca-Cola working ceaselessly to make sure Coke is available in popular places -- and in the case of Coca-Cola, literally everywhere on the planet.
Firefox isn't paid based on market share, they are paid to exist. It's a figleaf and it costs Google about 0.2% of their annual turnover. Compared to being broken up or fined that's much cheaper for Google.
Or it signals that Google limits bids to what's profitable, and Yahoo outbid them. Which would suggest it does care, but only up to a limit.
I don't know offhand how the contracts work, if there's a minimum traffic sent clause, or any other direct tie in to user behavior, or if this is a lump sum auction "give us a billion dollars and we'll make you default for a year" scenario. Either way, I expect Google would scale the amount they pay based on traffic sent. Happy to read details from anyone who has them =)
But my question is: why did Yahoo outbid them? Yahoo doesn't need a fig leaf at all.
$19B to not build a competing search engine, this is essentially a pay off. I don’t see how the courts don’t atleast put an end to this. Apple is free to make a search engine which Spotlight essentially already is.
Calling Spotlight a "search engine" is like calling a Hotwheelz car "a race car". Like, yeah, it can search for stuff, but the scale of what 99.99% of people expect a "search engine" to do is many, many orders of magnitude larger than what Spotlight does. Hell, Spotlight struggles to find a file by name on my laptop in under a few seconds.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 417 ms ] threadWhat’s the thinking behind giving Apple a ton of free money so they can have more resources for marketing and R&D and become even stronger competition for Android? iPhone is gaining more and more market share every year. Seems like Google wants to save their search business by sacrificing Android.
That being said Apple is a company with enough cash and time to throw at Search. People also said that it would be hard to break Google’s dominance of maps.
You and I would change our search engine but most iPhone users need an apple-maps-level mess up to go switch from the defaults (and even then that’s stabilized to a majority apple share now). Bing+apple could have been an existential threat to them in the mobile era; without android they would’ve had to pay whatever apple wanted.
And after seeing I wasn't blocked it has become my go-to in the last few weeks; I've ended up using it about 10 times in the last month.
Even Yandex.com has started to send me captchas. Once I encounter a captcha page I quickly switch over to bing or ddg. No time for the captcha bullshit.
Not to mention that Google can do first party ad injection on results to shift people towards Android, decreasing the cost per user for impressions and sucking more data out of them to again, fuel the ad machine.
Apple is getting a 'crap free' google search results currently.
* or more accurately keep it in the development phase for almost a decade now.
They've kind of been building all the pieces over the years with spotlight integrations/etc...
In the search wars Google is the entrenched and slowly dying search engine with a lot of up and comers ready to lead the charge to better search.
I’ve used DDG for years at this point and the number of times I’ve needed to drop back to Google has fallen to zero for the past few of them.
My friend you do not know people.
People will happily use the default search engine, no matter what it is, and believe that it's Google they're using, unless the search engine goes out of its way to tell the user that it's using something else.
People don't read error messages, people click away whatever gets in their way, people don't even notice logos.
As long as people find out which celebrity was in what movie or what restaurants are nearby, they wont care if it’s google or Bing that tells them.
Bing has a roughly 8% desktop market share. PC has a 70% market share.
That means about 11.5% of windows computer didn’t switch away from Bing.
Assume a similar share on apple devices. Apple has two billion active devices.
Assume that is 1.5 billion people, round down market share to 10%: 150 million of the richest customers on earth. What is that worth to google?
Not to mention another competitor could buy the spots for less. If google leaves an opening someone would try to compete. Even Apple might.
So there’s future downside risk along with the risk to present profits.
This is the crux of the underlying legal theory that this case is exploring. If the above statement is true, then yes; Google has been just burning money, and "stupid waste" isn't an antitrust issue (though maybe their shareholders could file a lawsuit).
But the DOJ makes the case that Google doesn't see it that way, Apple doesn't see it that way, and users don't see it that way... That if Apple changed the default to Bing tomorrow, users are so under-informed about the way the web works that Microsoft and Google's search share would swing radically and immediately. There's meat on those bones; people (who aren't Extremely Online HN Users, like yours truly) seem to find the search engines interchangeable, which implies the default matters. A lot.
No they wouldn‘t. A lot of testing and (probably?) research has shown that a massive amount of regular normie users will never change any defaults of any kind. Many would probably not even notice what search engine they‘re using. Defaults are incredibly powerful. They would easily accept a marginally worse product.
https://nosweatshakespeare.com/blog/shakespeare-puns/
https://www.tandfonline.com/keyword/puns
I never said they were hated by all, and my statement was in the context of a HN thread- obvious why such content is useless, even to the op themselves
If you think humor is useless, you lead a sad existence.
Wait, what? These search engines are being forced by Apple into revshare deals just for being on the platform without even being the default?
I remember when Android switched (in the EU) from having Google be the default search to having the users pick from a list during device setup. They initially proposed determining who gets to be on the list via an auction. Companies like Duck Duck Go were outraged, and demanded to be listed for free, and eventually Android went with listing the most popular search engines in each country.
Now it turns out that they've been paying Apple all this time, and not said a word. I guess it makes sense. Duck Duck Go cannot afford to speak against Apple for fear of retaliation, while Google is a punching bag they can hit for free PR any time they feel like it.
The two situations are not quite as similar as you are presenting them to be.
How about something simple like I don't know, a text box? Or even detecting support?
No no no that would be entirely too difficult to do.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-or-remove-search-en...
Making it harder for new search engines to rise is the thing that happens now because you can't even be offered as an option unless you already have enough money to pay the danegeld.
Most alternatives, end-up using hacky safari extensions that hijack the query to Google and force a redirect.
Particularly relevant for this case:
> The only exception is Google – we don’t make money when you search with Google. However, we know that some of you use this search engine daily, so we include it in Vivaldi.
Especially when the latter makes a huge hullabaloo around user privacy that the former does not support.
I’m doing it rn.
Jokes aside, yeah they should both be in trouble, but if that was the case then Apple wouldn’t be testifying against google.
I like the few times where the government gives companies reasons to fight each other rather than work together.
Plus, the option only applies to Safari - not Spotlight or Siri, which are presumably used more often.
It sounds to me like this revenue share agreement was invented specifically to make this equal-opportunity argument to save their Google revenue.
Apple probably would have slow rolled web cohort privacy more like what Google is doing in Chrome if FB would have paid to play.
That did not work out and FB paid far more in market cap and loss in rev then if they would have just kissed the ring.
So all told it's odd that Google is on trial for playing in Apple device Monopoly.
Maybe Google would do best to point to the deviation of FB business for not playing ball with Apple; showing their hands were tied ;)
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-apple-vs-facebook-pr...
It'll be interesting to see if the courts actually enforce the law, or if these cases get decided on political influence instead. Previous testimony in this case is pretty damning for Google, since it implies their ad business is built on multiple levels of fraud. That ought to be enough to get them to lose the case.
Time will tell. Happily, it's possible for all three of those players to be found guilty. It's not an either/or situation.
I have not been following this as closely as I should have. Is there a specific source of that testimony that I can search for?
How much Google pays to Apple is directly proportional to how much Google needs to be on Apple devices to maintain search hegemony.
Apple is being paid for being popular. The economics of maintaining a search monopoly are weird.
It's no different than Coca-Cola working ceaselessly to make sure Coke is available in popular places -- and in the case of Coca-Cola, literally everywhere on the planet.
Fall below that line, whatever it is, and their ability to generate revenue looks very different.
So it'd be more like if people stopped wanting Coke if it fell below 40% market share.
A closer analogy would be the price Coke could charge third parties to be co-stocked in Coke machines.
I don't know offhand how the contracts work, if there's a minimum traffic sent clause, or any other direct tie in to user behavior, or if this is a lump sum auction "give us a billion dollars and we'll make you default for a year" scenario. Either way, I expect Google would scale the amount they pay based on traffic sent. Happy to read details from anyone who has them =)
But my question is: why did Yahoo outbid them? Yahoo doesn't need a fig leaf at all.