So, in other words, $25B worth of attention is transferred from iOS users to Google[1], which Google pays Apple $3B for this access.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/24/16020330/google-digital-mob...
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/7/24/16020330/google-digital-mob...
Sure, so long as we agree the search results are relevant.
Apple users don't complain that the default Maps app is Apple Maps, despite Apple Maps being a famous punchline.
Maybe Google was much better at some point in time in the past, but I haven't noticed any meaningful difference these days.
Google's advantage is their massive brand awareness. They've done an outstanding job with brand marketing - positioning themselves as smart and nerdy, so people are inclined to subconsciously think of them as highly performant, even without any evidence to back it up.
My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product.
And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.
I've been using Bing for about a year now and it's almost indistinguishable from Google.
Google seems to be better at heavily semantic queries. For example, just recently I tried "that picture where capitalism is represented as a giant octopus". Bing didn't have the picture I wanted on the first page. Google did but wasn't the first hit.
But for 99.9% of the queries, if you say Google is "order of magnitude better", you're talking out of your ass and my suspicion is you haven't even bothered trying anything else in at least 5 years.
DDG's results have been better than google's for years now.
From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
Bing is down to 2.5% market share , global and all platforms.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search engine market share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats
Down to 6.5% in the US for all platforms. But is also declining.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni...
Plus Bing having so little share and revs to invest it has really fallen behind Google in particular in Mobile.
Remember that Google was pushing performance, had a massive install base and marketing budget during those years.
There is a huge amount of friction added to a system (in this case, the browser-web ecosystem) when a major change like the default search engine is changed. The aggregation of all frictions is what causes users to alter their behavior or seek other solutions to reduce that friction. If iOS were to switch, some users would figure out how to change their default setting, others would simply see an increase in frustration with "the product" (meaning iOS + web search). It is likely to cause some migration, but probably not a significant amount until and unless other frictions are added.
I'm 100% sure the top search query in any other search engine they place by default would be "google".
I think #1 reason is aggressive marketing.
I’ve been using MS Edge for a couple of years. Works OK, the only minor issue was annoying popups on e.g. youtube advertising Chrome. Fortunately, adblock worked.