Hacker News Reader

Comment by nkingsy | Hacker News Reader

My question is, would Apple default to different search engine if they weren't getting paid? Given Google's utter dominance in search, it would likely be seen as anti-user behavior to default to something else.

This one and the fact that Microsoft takes all the licensing revenue from Android seem to bubble up every few months. Head-scratching stuff from companies playing on levels of scale where strange things start to make sense.

View on HN

If they weren't getting paid they'd just switch to Bing or DuckDuckGo. As much as Google might like to believe that people will specifically seek them out because they are a better product, search is a utility and most people will be fine with Bing/DuckDuckGo. We know this exactly because Google pays TAC.

I agree in general but if 1.4 billion devices simultaneously started using duckduckgo their servers would melt through the mantle and merge with the inner core.

If done in a heartbeat. But they'd probably even get funds from Apple to scale.

So from +$9B to what? -$100M?

Apple would definitely go to Microsoft to get payment for pushing traffic to their MSN network instead.

Apple had previously used Bing as the default search in certain areas, such as Siri and the Search bar.

But did they switch because they could get more money from Google, because they could give users better search results with Google, or because they didn't want to confuse users who google things and get confused that the google is broken and says bing instead?

Money. Google offered the same or better experience when bing was the default.

If they could not receive any kind of payment or kickback from any company I would give it a 70% chance they pick Google. As it stands, Apple knows that it can charge Google and Google knows its worth paying so they stay in the mutually beneficial relationship.

I think Apple has the power to establish a competitor - After all most searches are simple and DuckDuckGo well satisfies those. I stil seek out Google every once in a while, but how many users will go through the trouble to change the default, especially when you have !g?.

My next question is even if they do lose on search, with all their very successful "side" businesses, how much would it impact them at this point?

Google is actually pretty well optimized for the simplest, most mindless searches. It sucks for anything complex, though - Bing/DDG is a lot better there.

I think mindless and complex might not be the right words to use here.

I find google searching to be similar to writing. If I distill the question down to the crucial elements and use clear english, I get great results. If I throw all the elements of my question in and hope for the best, I usually am disappointed.

> My next question is even if they do lose on search, with all their very successful "side" businesses, how much would it impact them at this point?

Are you talking about Apple or Google?

If Apple launches a search engine that fails it'll have huge brand image implications. Their brand is their most valuable asset.

If Google Search were to fail then Google would lose the majority of their revenue. Sure, they could continue, but they probably would not be considered part of the Big Four anymore.

Apple already has a search engine.

You will see Siri Suggested websites coming up before Google’s results.

Google's market share is slightly more than 3/4 of all search [0]. They have a strong majority of all searches, and they dominant some submarkets of search, but they are far from total market dominance.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as...

I feel like 3/4 is pretty much dominance. If Ford sold 3/4 of all cars purchased in America, I think you'd say they were dominating the automobile market.

It's a good position, but it's far from a monopoly most people treat it as.

Google's market share is somewhere between 88% and 98% almost everywhere outside of China and Russia. These are pretty significant "submarkets".

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

But I think what these statistics do not reflect is the growing share of Amazon in product search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com