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Comment by edouard-harris | Hacker News Reader

> Google also pays Apple 7 billion annually^ to be its default SE.

It's actually between $8-12 billion now. [1]

> Yahoo & MSFT's experience as 2nd place in that market was working very hard and earning $0 profits.

This is an exaggeration though. MSFT made nearly $8 billion in revenue last year from search (mostly Bing), and the business has naturally high margins so it would be extremely surprising if it was unprofitable on an operating basis. [2] The reality is that search is so huge that it's worth competing in, even if the incumbent has 30X your market share.

[1] https://twitter.com/jowens510/status/1428416856038072321

[2] https://backlinko.com/bing-users

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It’s likely the payoff is also to prevent apple from building its own search engine to compete. As googles payoff is so lucrative

Maybe, but Google Maps seems to do fine on iPhone. Google and Apple might have their own numbers on this that disagree, though.

Google Maps has a better data collection method (bugging their userbase to collect data for them, encouraging users to collect even more as Google Scouts) and also the dataset of Waze, while Apple has a much more laborious process where an Apple Contractor (initially in Austin or Cupertino) modifies points of interest, business hours, road alignments, etc manually.

Apple started to ship this operation over to India 5ish years ago, and their contractors over there produce much worse results as they are not hiring professional geographers with degrees like they did stateside.

I wish more people would realize they are literally working for Google without getting paid to do this work. If it's out of a greater sense of helping people and contributions, OpenStreetMap needs to be better known.

Russian tech giant Yandex (they mostly do everything that Google does: search, maps, email, etc) has a so-called "People's map", filled by volunteers who transfer rights for their edits to Yandex for free the use in their closed commercial project. I always wondered why these volunteers don't work on OpenStreetMap instead.

Perhaps they simply don't know about it. OSM is doing its own thing and doesn't market itself much to the general audience. But for things that Google/Yandex are grabbing for free (opening hours, whether shops still exist, etc.), StreetComplete should be known much better, IMHO.

It doesn't really help OSM that its home page is considered just an example of what can be done with the data and not positioning it as an alternative to Google/Bing Maps is somewhat intentional.

If the goal is just helping people, why would OpenStreetMaps be preferred over Google Maps?

I love answering questions on Maps and providing information for others (in my eyes: effectively working for them, not Google). Google Maps seems like it has a significantly larger user base, so my contributions help significantly more people.

It's very much a help-and-be-helped community, too. I can ask questions about businesses and have answers from other people in just a couple minutes. I don't imagine I'd have the same quality/speed asking questions on OSM (if they even have that feature?).

There have been reports and speculation that they’re doing just that. Of course it’s worth it for the negotiation threat alone, but Apple also really doesn’t seem to like depending on Google.

I personally can’t see them switching any time soon, as DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data.

That sounds like a cartel to me.

>DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible

I would like someone to make some objective research on that.

My experience is the reverse, so I strongly suspect our reticence is just one of changing our habit more than an real thing.

I switched to DDG years ago and it took a few weeks to wean out the tendency to compare searches, usually brought on by the fear of missing out something.

I very rarely have to resort to a !g search and usually if I can't find it on DDG, I won't easily find it on google either.

I don't feel like missing out on anything and I always find what I need (and if I don't, I can't find it in other searches either).

Other platforms have some strength in some area, like Bing and Google have more tools for image searches, and it's possible that one of these is better than the others at some specific domain, like research papers or patent searches.

But after switching to DDG, all these options are still available and -at least in my case- 99%+ of my needs are met with it.

I've found it's very dependent on what I'm searching for. DDG results tend to match my search patterns better, but it often seems they are missing pages with all the correct keywords that google returns. I suspect it just comes down to Google having crawled more pages, and having had more resources to invest in optimizing result hierarchies.

There is not much interesting stuff on the internet these days outside closed FB etc, so search is just not as important as it used to be.

I don’t use Facebook at all and I’ve never had any problem finding interesting stuff on the Internet (quite the opposite - there is too much stuff and not enough time). What interesting stuff is only available on Facebook?

That's a sad statement. I never even had Facebook and I love the Internet.

I think it's opposite. There is as much good stuff as before but it's drowned in crap, and that's exactly why search engines are so important.

Ironic for this debate to be happening here (publicly indexed, searchable)

You must be kidding. There are worlds of interesting stuff outside FB, in fact if FB ceased to exist this very moment, the amount of interesting stuff around would not diminish by even a thousandth of a percent. If you think interesting stuff is only on FB, maybe this is the time to try and broaden your horizons and actively look outside of it.

Having used DDG for almost a decade now, I indeed doubt any objective research would come up showing the results are never up to par or even better than Google's (or other search engines for that matter). Of course I'm also not going to compare DDG results with others when DDG immediately finds what I need so never really checked that myself actually..

Still, no matter how much I like and promote DDG, I'm definitely not in the 'I always find what I need' camp. I don't know why but DDG is simply bad in some aspects. Sometimes it can be circumvented by altering search terms, but other times I have the impression after all those years its crawling or database is still lacking. I encounter this almost daily, most recent example: searching for 'preamp for hypex' Google and Bing (in private search windows) immediately turn up posts from audio forums I expect to have these topics. DDG just doesn't have those probably, because instead it automatically "Includes results for amplifier hypex" (which I find extremely annoying in any case, and makes no sense in this case since the word 'preamp' is key) and after forcing it to quote each term instead then it still doesn't come up with the expected results.

As somebody who worked on search engines in the past, I think there are contradictory requirements from different people. Some people only vaguely know what they want, and want the search engine to be smart and give them as broad field as possible, and if it doesn't, they call it "dumb". Some people need very precise thing in a sea of similarly looking things, and they need the engine to be strict, up to following the exact word order and keeping "filler" words in (looking for "to be or not to be" with common words filter on might be hard :) and so on. And if the engine is not strict enough, they call it "full of junk". It's very hard to find the right balance between the two, especially if you don't build per-user profiles. I'm not saying there aren't solutions but it's a very tricky business with a lot of failure modes.

I can't add research but perspective: I search in English, German, French and sometimes other languages. For EN DDG is hit and miss, I'd say 1/2 times it gives me the result that I'm looking for. For DE and FR the result quality is often much lower.

This means at least about half the time I end up with a !g I'm my DDG search.

I don't think bing will be a useful competitor in the long term, but a company that focuses on non-English national/linguistic markets, especially those with own character sets can compete in that area, innovate and hopefully also branch out on the EN market (see Yandex - RU; Yahoo - JP; various CN players).

I'm sure it is fine for English (American). I'll try it again, but as someone who is English (British) it was awful, and never could get UK localised searches correct.

DDG is so much better than Google for me.

Likewise for me. I think the primary reason for this is the huge decline in the quality of Google search results over the last decade.

my experience (sample size < 5) is that people that use Google with an adblocker have a very nice experience and don't have an adblocker have a miserable experience.

I would say that for the internet as a whole.

I’ve been using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on all devices for years. I’ve never had a problem finding what I’m looking for and have never felt the need to use a different search engine to get different results. YMMV.

Google results aren't much better, I feel that nowadays, if I want to find anything relevant, I need to use site:, and most often than not, it'll be either stackoverflow, reddit and some other french sites. Anything else is either spam/sales or ebay "proxys".

It's scary how the web feels much more narrower.

Yeah using reddit for a lot of searches is usually my default now.

Search for reddit/stackexchange/whatever pro forums, but on Google.

BTW I wish any stackexchange sites are under single domain.

I found it varies. When I don't find something with DDG, I use !g to switch to Google. Google often finds it.

But the reverse is true too. DDG is now my default, but before, when Google didn't find something, I'd switch to DDG.

There is an implicit learning curve switching search engines. The way one crafts searches differs in subtle ways I don't understand on a conscious level.

Instead of using !g as fallback, I prefer to use !sp. You still get the Google results but they are proxied via startpage.com for better privacy.

I used to mainly use startpage.com, but when they were sold to a subsidiary of an adtech company, I stopped using them.

I use DDG on all my devices, and my experience was very good. I fallback to Google in, perhaps, 1% of cases.

> DuckDuckGo’s search results are something between worse to terrible and I’m not sure they can do much better without collecting more data

Last I checked, DDG's search results are just Bing (aside from the infobox-type stuff which is from their own data sources), and Bing does collect data from Microsoft's browsers and toolbars https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

A year ago, after becoming fed up with my dad clicking financial scam ads, I switched his search to DDG. Thus far, he hasn't noticed.

The tide has shifted this year and ddg is returning better results

DDG search has been much better for me than google and has been for a few years. Google search has become a complete disaster. I'm curious about what you mean by DDG being so much worse.

I've been using DDG for years now and the results are entirely adequate. There are some niches where Google still delivers better results but I need them no more than once a month, sometimes even less than that. I guess it depends on which part of the data set you're hitting...

If I were Apple, I would spend at least $1B of that $7B on developing a secret new search engine :)

I think a lot of people overestimate how easy it is to make a search engine, and underestimate how hard it is to sell search to advertisers.

I think this is closer to a 50B problem than a 1B problem. Not impossible, but I don’t know anyone who has 50B that they would want to spend fighting uphill to kill google.

A 50B$ problem is only 5 years of these 10B$ per year. I’d be surprised if Apple wasn’t on it.

I find this really hard to believe.

Say, you manage to recruit the top-30 engineers who know all the in-and-outs of the google search engine. Add to that, their recent replacement of trad AI methods with full NN I believe, and I can't realistically believe it's not more than a 1B problem.

One of the reasons Google is going horizontal because their search engine can't be "magical" forever, this applies to their ad platform too.

Remaking Google requires engineering talent and lots of clickstream data (ie. Hundreds of Billions of search queries and information about what search results were clicked by which users).

Nobody else has this, and until they do, they won't be able to recreate Google.

Is it not like statistical certainty: i.e. you need a million or so queries to cover the range of your possible outcomes, and the hundreds of billions just takes you from 0.999999 certainty to 0.9999999999999999999?

You do NOT get added benefit from big data by taking it from millions to hundreds of billions. It becomes just a lesson in scale, without bringing any added benefit of insight.

With ML methods, they do benefit from taking data from millions to billions.

You can see that yourself with Google by searching for something obscure (eg. "how to unblock a drain jammed with cat fur") and getting three friends to click the 2nd search result. Come back in a week, and suddenly the 2nd result is now the first result! (ignore the videos and answer box)

It turns out just three new data points is enough to influence ranking for that query. It even affected related queries if you change the word "jammed" for "gunked".

Here are just a few of the things you aren’t considering:

* how many people worldwide keep their google places information up-to-date and not their local government office or their website.

* how advertisers can get value for their search ad campaigns; how to convince them of this

* how much google ad/targeting intelligence comes from off-site (eg Adsense, partner programs, xml ads)

* how many websites and website owners focus obsessively on their google presence making sure that even where Google’s tech gets it wrong they can get it corrected.

* how valuable the feedback loop is: google ads literally tells google what pages and terms are useful, what people like, and what to do more of at scale

* giving away free email and chat to build a whitelist of “good shares”

And that doesn’t cover video or the inverted index you need to provide governments access to emails and search terms. And so on.

These are largely not-software problems.

Apple has all that data, if not better, on a much more valuable audience at that, and can market themselves as "privacy friendly" because only they will leverage said data and won't let anyone in on their platform, and naturally you will trust Apple.

Hell they can even throw a spin on how it's about "privacy" and not about taking another way to bank on their walled garden monopoly and the Apple crowd here will gobble it up with "we are finally free from Google spying, praise Tim and his holy father Steve in heaven".

I've been arguing app stores are a monopoly for years now and the amount of cultist here that were like "Apple is doing it to protect me from bad software" and "I would not use my iPhone if there was an option to install a different store" was staggering.

Sure. Let's say Apple users gobble it up.

Apple's shareholders won't.

They'll want to know where their 10bn (ish) USD went that Apple currently gets from Google.

Is Apple going to increase their device sales substantially because of an Apple search engine? I think everyone who is going to buy Apple has bought Apple, so I think not.

On the other hand, if Apple sells ads on Apple search, and they charge the same fees Google does, they'll still need 50bn in turnover to drop Google; Advertisers aren't going to double their marketing budget, they'll split it based on the ROI, and unless Apple ads convert as good or better than Google, this is a net loss.

It's not a tech problem.

Google is valued like "real estate", it's the best address. And then you need the advertising network for it be worthwhile.

Apple, like Microsoft, can replace google as the default search, but that alone is not a big chunk of the market. It might not be worthwhile.

Otherwise, of course it can be done, and for even less than that.

If some company can sell something to people, even while perfectly fine analogues exist, and then charge double price and have people scream in delight about it - that's Apple.

>>business' has naturally high margins

$8bn in revenue might not mean profitable. Google certainly spend a lot more than this on search and advertising, and well... software scales.

In any case, whether they make $1bn in profit, losses or something in between... This is <1% of market profits. Apple is making $8bn-$12bn, all profit, just on defaults.

GP is saying naturally high margins because it is a pure software play with close-to-zero marginal distribution cost and massive scale.

We don’t know if Bing’s profitable but GP is merely saying that with the circumstances above it is an interesting market for Microsoft to pursue.

Perhaps, but I think it's marginal in practice. Whether MSFT makes an internally accounted 10% margin or 10% loss on their $8bn in revenue, Apple collect >$8bn which is entirely profit.

Cooperating and accepting a slice of Google's monopoly profits is far more profitable that competing would be, in all but the most bullish scenarios.

IE, MSFT would need to be outright challenging Google's 1st place position in search marketing to have a hope of earning more than Apple do by doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.

Also, what would it take for MSFT to compete with Google in earnest? For one thing, Microsoft would need to outbid Google for such deals. They'd need to pay Apple, Telcos, and such more than Google do now.

> by [Apple] doing nothing, spending nothing, investing nothing and taking no risks.

Apple did none of those things with respect to launching a search engine. Apple did all of those things with respect to building an audience of daily engaged (often affluent) users. That’s the investment Apple made to earn the position to cash Google’s check.

It’s insane that Google spends more than Bing’s entire yearly revenue in order to buy a default spot and keep their competitors out of it.

Not really. It's a scale issue. Such an expenditure to Google is like a billionaire dropping ten thousand dollars on something, compared to a normal human asked to come up with ten thousand dollars.

Buying a default spot is the interesting aspect here. Google spending more than Bing's entire yearly revenue just means they want that thing, and tells you their relative wealth. I figure this applies just as well to corporations as it does to individuals: if you're going to look askance at Jeff Bezos etc. you may as well keep an eye on businesses with similar disparities of scale relative to their market sector. Not like we haven't seen all this before.

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