Yeah, it is indicative of the monopoly and exclusion agreements that even if you made a search as good as google once was, you'd never get sufficient traffic to it.
Virtually no stock price impact so far, kinda weird if 65% of revenue could be wiped out by the decision.
If anything Google will be more profitable now because any choice that Apple gives its users will inevitably end up with 99% of them choosing Google but now it costs them nothing
I think you're underestimating the power of defaults. Most people are just going to use whatever default the system/browser uses and not bother changing, most won't even know how to do it.
I was thinking about it last night, and the Judge took issue specifically with Google paying to be the default.
What if Apple didn’t take a deal with anybody to be the default, but offered a search engine choice screen and charged anyone on it a commission on their ad revenue from Safari traffic?
Nah, it was definitely head and shoulders above the rest for the majority of this agreement starting from the very first version of Safari Apple shipped. It’s only relatively recently that the answer to the question of “is Google the best search engine?” has begun to slip from a definite “yes” to a “maybe not”.
Of the free search engines on the market though, I think it’s still head and shoulders above the rest, but by a smaller margin and it’s certainly not as good as Google circa 2012.
Many people don't bother looking for alternatives because it is shipped by default in their web browser. They may don't even know what a search engine is, nor that there are more than the one they use on a daily basis, but have internalized "google" as a verb.
I for example "still" use it. Sometimes it still gives more precise results than any other alternative. No alternative I've ever tried gives precise local results for this country - DuckDuckGo or Mojeek, for example, not only don't have "Colombia" in it - they don't have anything "Latin America" in it.
And I don't want to spend money on something like Kagi. Not even sure if they accept payments from here, and not a fan of the idea of even more paid subscriptions.
Shameless Kagi shill here - the company's leadership is shaky and has a recent tendency to focus dumb AI things, but their core product is 2012 Google. It _feels_ even better than 2012 Google. Combine a quality search engine w/ the fact that I can walk from funding them the moment they look to ads for revenue and I'm a very happy customer.
Personally, I’ve switched to kagi. I’m not sure it’s objectively better, but the weird spam results seem to be gone, and I found them so painful I’ve never been tempted to retry an unsatisfactory result from kagi in google.
I wonder if Google really has a monopoly everywhere. Or is that a case this is US centric. I know South Korea aren't using Google. Japan used to be Yahoo not sure if Google is making ways.
Are there other countries just dont rely on Google as much?
And on the subject, does any one know if there were ever a report on what people search most in categorised terms?
25 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 63.3 ms ] threadVirtually no stock price impact so far, kinda weird if 65% of revenue could be wiped out by the decision.
If anything Google will be more profitable now because any choice that Apple gives its users will inevitably end up with 99% of them choosing Google but now it costs them nothing
I was thinking about it last night, and the Judge took issue specifically with Google paying to be the default.
What if Apple didn’t take a deal with anybody to be the default, but offered a search engine choice screen and charged anyone on it a commission on their ad revenue from Safari traffic?
I'm a huge fan of that. Welcome to HN.
See the case of the ghost of Altavista
Of the free search engines on the market though, I think it’s still head and shoulders above the rest, but by a smaller margin and it’s certainly not as good as Google circa 2012.
Many people don't bother looking for alternatives because it is shipped by default in their web browser. They may don't even know what a search engine is, nor that there are more than the one they use on a daily basis, but have internalized "google" as a verb.
I for example "still" use it. Sometimes it still gives more precise results than any other alternative. No alternative I've ever tried gives precise local results for this country - DuckDuckGo or Mojeek, for example, not only don't have "Colombia" in it - they don't have anything "Latin America" in it.
And I don't want to spend money on something like Kagi. Not even sure if they accept payments from here, and not a fan of the idea of even more paid subscriptions.
Related:
Does everyone hate Google now?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41176465
Are there other countries just dont rely on Google as much?
And on the subject, does any one know if there were ever a report on what people search most in categorised terms?