Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, do you think threatening to remove google as the default search engine is a serious threat? I use ddg and tried Bing when they were paying people to use it, but I have no illusions that google is by far the most superior search engine. It would be weird if they switched the default.

But then again... apple maps.

View on HN

> do you think threatening to remove google as the default search engine is a serious threat?

It would be if Apple made a search engine. Media will spin this as a Search Engine that values your privacy from Apple. It is the best thing ever etc. Given Apple's consumer branding, as long as it isn't so bad people will use it.

The problem is I dont see that happening. $10B of pure profits is a large amount of money doesn't matter how you slice and dice it.

Making a half decent search engine is still very hard. They are happy to squeeze Google, making less information available to Google in the name of privacy, all while eating away all the profitable Smartphone market shares.

That is one reason I dont quite like current Apple. It reeks of hypocrisy. Stop attacking Google as evil, painting themselves as Saint, all while happily receiving Billions of dollars. But current media seems to like this idea, and it fit well with the current US political spectrum.

You could argue that Apple provides real value to users (not just with better devices/UX, but now also with better privacy), and their massive profits are just a reflection of that value.

Because Apple makes most of its money from device sales, they have less of an incentive to snoop on their users. Their business model is just better aligned with something that users are actually starting to value now: privacy.

Apple gets ~$12 billion a year for making Google the default search engine on Safari. Apple's revenues in 2020 were $274.5 billion, so this counts to something like 8% of Apple revenues. 8% is either big enough not to discount in the final revenue calculation, or small enough that they can choose to hit Google with its revocation.

I think it would be better to use Profits percentage than revenue. There are COGS and other running cost with Services. Even App Store has curation cost, processing fees, hosting, Store Credit Rebate, Promotion and Marketing.

Search Engine Placement has literally Zero. It is pure 100% raw profit.

Apple reported net income of 57.41 billion U.S. dollars in its 2020 fiscal year.

Wow, Apple's revenues put it #16 in revenues of countries, ahead of Mexico [0]. Although if Apple were a country, GDP would probably be a better measure; even so it's still around #45, depending who is evaluating GDP [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

I think Google's brand power is by far the most important thing here. When people don't find what they're looking for on Google, the figure it's hard to find, or they need to learn how to query better. When people don't find what they're looking for on Bing, they think it's Bing's fault.

Edit: as for your actual question: possibly. In my opinion the quality difference between Google & Apple Maps is greater than Google vs Bing search.

Apple maps is inferior but it looks pretty nice and its their own service. I couldn't imagine them rolling out Bing as the default search engine. That would seem out of character.

Depends what you are using your search engine for. Getting the actually most popular thing in the area where there's a lot of competition? They're good at that. But when trying to find some obscure string in a context it's just hopeless. They seemed to have completely given up on the idea of being able to somewhat grep through the web. I often won't get results for queries which DDG and Bing have pages for.

Which I don't get, they probably could afford to have even a completely separate backend for quoted strings and store way more data than DDG.

> that google is by far the most superior search engine.

Is it? I find the amount of censorship and manipulation in Google's results since last yeast has really affected its performance on my end.

It's just alarming when you can search for something in Google and not find it, then type the same query in Bing or DDG, and you get the desired result immediately. And I do mean absolutely benign searches like news articles and published research.

> searches like news articles and published research.

Google does not censor real news articles. Nor legit research AFAICT. A quick Bing and DDG search along with browsing of the Wikipedia article on this topic[1] yielded nothing major.

If you want to "research" on how Sandy Hook school shooting was a false flag, that California wildfires were set by Jewish space lasers, or other the QAnon conspiracies, yeah Google sucks. But if you are doing actual research for work or school, neither DDG nor Bing come close. I used DDG heavily when I was in China, and it was garbage for work.

After living China, I am well aware how horrible censorship is to democracy. But you know what's worse? How Facebook's algorithms have radicalized our country. Most members of my family (our country for that matter) get their news from Facebook, much if it is the most extreme garage to keep engagement numbers high, not good journalism based on facts.

I'm fairly certain page rank demotes this garbage because it’s poor quality, not as a service to our society. But as long as Facebook/OANN continue to profit off of tearing our society apart, it's probably a good thing. Of course, teaching critical thinking in school would negate this problem, but that’s a too much to ask from a culture that puts more value in sports than education.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_Google

I find conspiracy theories fun so I search for them. You can never get the actual conspiracy websites on Google, just debunking articles and often a Google warning box as well.

Compare the results for ‘fake moon landing’ on Google and bing. The results are pretty stark.

Do you have examples of such discrepancy?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com