Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari search engine in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari search engine in 2021

9to5mac.com

348 pointsmiles324 comments

People who say "they can just build their own search engine" should try Apple Maps.

Yeah, it's not bad, but from my 18 months in Google Maps, I know there's a very long tail you have to get through. They have huge teams working on problems so small you wouldn't even realize they were problems.

The first 90% of maps (or search) is easy. It's the 2nd and 3rd and 10th 90% that sucks up all the time.

> People who say "they can just build their own search engine" should try Apple Maps.

... to be validated by concrete demonstration that Apple is capable of building an excellent service if they put their mind to it...

Excellent? It works but Google are pretty obviously the top dog here

Is this true? Apple Maps came out with a feature a couple years ago where it knows which intersections are stop lights v.s. stop signs v.s. uncontrolled side streets. Rather than saying “in 1000 feet turn left”, they say “at the light, turn left”. As opposed to “go past this light, then turn left,” or “at the stop sign, turn left. Then, turn right onto <street name>.” If you glance at the screen while this is happening, the upcoming intersections helpfully have the appropriate stoplight/stopsign/etc graphic on them. They’ve found a way to communicate instructions such that you never have to worry about lane positioning, or not being ready for the next turn.

Mind you, I juggle between Apple Maps and Google Maps on an iphone, so maybe Google’s features are different on Android. But this was the feature that finally got me using Apple Maps by default, and last I checked Google still hasn’t implemented anything comparable on Apple.

Google Maps does a similar thing with POI's like Starbucks or gas stations.

I always struggled with that. Way easier to visually identify a landmark that's on the road than adjacent to it, IMO.

Using Apple Maps in the few spots they actually care to fully support, and using Apple Maps anywhere else in the world is a very different experience.

While Google is able to deliver more or less the same product almost anywhere.

Google and Apple have been playing cat and mouse with their map data for a while now, with Google's newest version only existing in four cities: London, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo.

Are those the only cities Google cares to fully support, or does creating new and more detailed map data take a while to roll out?

Apple Maps is a complete joke in India for instance. I’ve heard of stories of people getting lost because they followed it, then they open Google Maps and get the actual directions. Apple Maps is also almost never updated here. Good luck finding new places, instead you will find places that were closed 2 years ago.

I like its new UI but the most crucial parts of the Map such as directions are so horribly wrong that it would frustrate you.

I know it was trash when it came out, but Apple Maps surprisingly seems to often find significantly shorter routes than Google. Google Maps always tells me to go to the nearest interstate while Apple Maps seems better at recognizing if a local highway is actually faster.

I have to double check the routing on both to make sure they are not making me go through 20 traffic lights to have a 10% probability of saving 45 seconds and 90% probability of wasting 2 min.

I don't doubt that it's usable in the areas where Apple cares to make it so.

But as the comments make clear, it's all about the number of 9s in the reliability. If they're 99.9% reliable, that means 1 out of 1000 data points are wrong. You will definitely hit a wrong one. If it's 99.9999%, then it's 1 out of 1,000,000. You might not. Adding those last few 9s are incredibly costly.

I find Apple Maps totally fine and basically on par with Google maps today. It was indeed trash when it came out but I use it exclusively now and haven’t had any issues in a couple years. My one gripe is the deep Yelp integration.

Where do you live?

Apple is taking steps to move away from Yelp:

https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/22/apple-maps-ratings-plac...

Thank goodness.

Another relevant point to consider is "is that 10% worth it?". The answer is absolutely yes - trust in a maps app is critical.

I don't think this is an entirely apt comparison.

You actually mention that even Google Maps has problems. I live in the Bay Area and have constantly experienced problems with it, including it directing me to a block or two behind the actual destination, directing me to more congested routes, etc.

I think when Apple Maps first launched it definitely was not good at all, but at this point they're roughly the same. Neither are perfect and that's fine, but comparing them as being drastically different levels of quality seems a bit far-fetched, to me at least.

Google Maps may have problems, but Apple Maps still has _problems_. Apple Maps still regularly takes me down roads closed for months, and has huge omissions in the business data set. One glaring example of the feature gap is apple maps on desktop versus google maps.

I don't think Apple Maps is bad, btw, and i think it's very good that they're trying to nip at Google's heels. But it's not even close.

Apple Maps is on desktop, do you mean on web? Either way, try searching on DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=directions+new+york+to+los+angeles...

I guess I meant desktop web vs mobile web. And yeah, that's how I use it, through DDG. It's visually low density (in a bad way), and satellite view is terribly slow. Among other things. But I do appreciate that they're trying - Google shouldn't own maps

A great example: in Austin, most surface roads’ speed limits were reduced by 5mph a year ago. Apple has yet to update these in their maps, despite one of their offices being just outside the city.

Apple maps are horrible in Croatia and Slovenia. Routing is bad, and the actual layers with info are a barren wasteland.

Apple maps are basically only a thing in the US, specifically in NY/SF and that's about it.

Am I crazy or are the people saying that getting the headline mixed up? Google is the one paying Apple fifteen billion dollars here, not the other way around. Why would Apple want off that gravy train? I’m sure they could make some search engine, but they’d have to be better than Google at monetizing it for it to be worth the effort.

I think the argument goes: Google is paying a massive $15B (or ca. 15% of Apple's profits) AND they are only doing that because there is more than $15B in value to them.

So if default iOS search has value in excess of $15B, Apple should just build their own and capture all of that value.

It's not an argument I agree with, and not one I think they will pursue.

Apple's P/E ratio is roughly 29. So, if you assume that the $15bn is pretty much all profit (for simplicity here remember), then the value of that for AAPL is roughly $35bn in market cap.

So it takes a really good reason to kick out Google from this situation.

> So it takes a really good reason to kick out Google from this situation.

Yes. The argument is that google makes more than 15b off that position, so the income has to be worth it by definition.

Of course, apple won't likely monetize it as well, so it'll be hard to justify that.

> Apple's P/E ratio is roughly 29. So, if you assume that the $15bn is pretty much all profit (for simplicity here remember), then the value of that for AAPL is roughly $35bn in market cap.

Not sure where you get $35B from. 15B * 29 = $435B

Typo. The $ was supposed to be 4. Thanks for catching that

If your employer is paying you 250k a year you shod definitely build something like this business and capture all that value!)

I think the biggest issue with Apple building a search engine is that it doesn't fit their brand and product suite.

Building a search engine comparable to Google requires utilizing tons of data and personalization in a way that Apple has never been comfortable with.

Apple is the company I pay more for and trust with privacy and not needing to spy on me for the sake of giving me personalized ads, while Google is the exact opposite.

>>The first 90% of maps (or search) is easy. It's the 2nd and 3rd and 10th 90% that sucks up all the time.

OK, let's look at it differently: was Apple smart to do Maps or not? Think of pros and cons and we know money means nothing. Apple has so much money they can spend $20 Billion in a quarter on it/them if they wanted.

They could do the same with a "good enough" SE and then let the heavy users set Google as default. Did they lose any users from Apple Maps?

Apple plays with lots of money and lots of time. They're definitely okay taking a decade and tons of $$$ to catch up to where Google is.

It's out of date, but still an interesting read: https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat

If they stopped sticking with Yelp, they would fare far better in my book. Reviews are a big part of what makes Google Maps awesome... for travel I use Apple Maps because the GPS voice on Google Maps is obnoxious and I don't like the UI that much, but Google Maps has a big win with reviews.

Ah, they joy of holding two conflicting thoughts at the same time! Like, Apple does not sell user data to third parties and Apple is sending all search traffic to Google by default for $15b a year.

How does having a default web search engine equate to "[Company] is sending *all* search traffic to [other company]"?

Users have preferences and may change the engines they search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.

95 % of users never touch predefined settings, so being the default almost always equates to being the "winner".

What they should do instead is to let people select a search engine based on different criteria (including privacy friendliness). Most people would then still choose Google but the effect would be way less pronounced.

Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.

The only thing pointing people to DDG or some inferior search engine would be to frustrate non-technical people when their search results become "weird".

Not all search engines are the same. I use DDG by default but I admit there is a huge difference between the two search engines and I use !g more than I'd like to admit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

>Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.

The 95% statistic only works when you introduce new, hidden option. People used Chrome/Firefox/whatever before Edge, they are used to it, and it's their default.

>Users have preferences and may change the engines they search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.

Well Google ofcourse clearly diasgree given they are willing to pay 15 billion dollars.

Some people will use it just because it's the default. Apple is paid because of that. So Apple is selling user data, i.e. violating privacy for money

some =/= all,

which is the point I was addressing in my original comment.

What's the alternative? Should Safari choose a default search engine by random per user or per session? Google is undoubtedly the best search engine in nearly all cases. Should Apple subject its users to a weaker engine just because Google has a different privacy policy? You can also change the default search engine.

Why wouldn't Apple accept a payment for bringing billions of dollars in traffic to Google?

Weaker... According to whom? I particularly use DDG on my personal devices and only occasionally go to Google. Whenever I'm using a machine that use Google as the default, I often go back to DDG to get results unspoiled by the bias pushed by Google's agenda, SEO and paid ads.

But answering your question, it could let the user choose their search engine as part of the onboarding experience while providing a random preselected default.

How many people actually want to switch from Google?

I think the bigger question is how many people would notice a switch? My family members now "google" stuff on DDG.

Google are paying tens of billions to keep them in the "default" dominant position because they know this.

Google results have fallen dramatically in terms of quality. I’d switch from current Google to Google circa 2018

I've been using Brave:

https://search.brave.com/

For my usage it gives good results, and it has the added bonus of providing links to google et al when you scroll down the results (it assumes that if the first page of results isn't good enough then the user will go elsewhere, so why not provide links to the other search engines?).

Wouldn't it be cheaper for Apple to just buy DDG or Brave?

I think you might be right.

I wanted to try brave, but it’s not even an option for safari iOS search main search bar! Only options are Google, yahoo, bing, ddg, and ecosia

Could you set it as your home-page? Obviously not as nice as going via the URL-bar, but at least you'll be able to get a taste of it.

Yes but honestly if it’s not in the url bar I’m not going to use it.

+1 for Brave search. I had used DDG for a couple years before and it was fine, but Brave actually seems good.

(I don't like their font but that's an easy fix with userstyles.)

Apple subjects it's user to a highest bidder. You can't seriously try to claim Apple is using Google as "best search engine" minute after seeing they are getting 15B for it.

Google is by far the best search engine.

Google pays Apple to set it as the default as its a positive sum to both sides. Google gets more than $15bn of value from the traffic and Apple gets $15bn for the obvious decision. Google could call Apple's bluff and refuse to pay, but Apple could pull through on their threat to replace default search with an inferior engine. They did it with Google Maps by replacing it with Apple Maps, which was a widely unpopular decision

They did it with Google and replaced it with Bing awhile back.

“Apple makes is very easy to stop sending your user data to third parties.”

Better?

Well, Google is the best search engine, and Apple wants the best user experience. This has the feel of getting paid $15b to do something you were going to do anyways.

Makes me wonder why they have to pay 15b in the first place. If it’s indeed a no-brainer for apple, the deal could be made with far less money?

I'd imagine with $15B Apple could bootstrap its own search engine.

There are getting 15B to NOT boostrap their search engine. If they bootstrap their own engine, they loose 15B on top of having to pay to build this own engine.

Exactly. Plenty of risks involved - they could just fail like Microsoft did, or if they pull it off it could seriously upset the balance in the ecosystem. Better reach a mutually beneficial agreement with everyone's "favorite" search company instead. Coopetition lol

Not worth it. It's not cheap maintaining a search engine. Apple could throw resources at it but what is the benefit? This is different than the Maps issue where Google refuse to provide new features for iPhone Maps. Apple used OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and created their own. By using OSM, it gave that project more visibility and others an alternative solution to Google Maps. A few years later Google suddenly makes it "not so free" for businesses displaying a map, they better put up a credit card.

Is it the best search engine anymore? Seems like the web is an seo hellhole when I’m looking for real information.

It's the best algorithm I would say, but the site itself has quite horrid design these days.

I've encouraged numerous non-technical friends and family members to switch to DuckDuckGo and they've all gone back to Google within a week.

Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG disappoints. and that happens frequently (although definitely not always)

That's my experience as well. I'm on DDG for a few months now, and I often resort to using Google when DDG doesn't give me the results I want.

I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.

How much of that is down to them missing the familiar look of the Google results page?

I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked to use a white-labeled search page where the results are served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed. They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3 months, and rank their satisfaction with it.

I imagine the results would be similar, but people would still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around for 20 years.

Microsoft did something like this almost a decade ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/bing-it-on-microsoft-claim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing#Bing_It_On

It was marginal, in favor of Bing, though I don't think they did extended experiments with individuals.

I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.

Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.

Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.

(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)

In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.

I really think DDG should at least search for results of "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more than Google.

The other day I was watching somebody search "Mass Effect Legendary Edition Ultrawide Support" while logged in to Google. They repeatedly got nothing but results for Heroes of the Storm, a completely different game which they had been playing a few days earlier. It was the creepiest thing. HotS is not a very popular game. I guarantee that most people searching "$VIDEO_GAME Ultrawide Support" are not looking for HotS info.

Anyway, on Bing and DDG both the first page of results were what I would have expected. Just like they would have been on Google ten years ago.

That query works well for me on Google.

I don't doubt it. I believe it was a results personalization issue. A history of queries related to one game caused it to include that game in all game-related queries. Maybe exacerbated by the heroes:legendary relationship? Who knows. I don't even recognize the Google algorithm year to year anymore. I don't expect to be able to reproduce anything.

Yes.

I use DDG as my default. The bang syntax is great for quick pivots and for wikipedia-like information. However, digging deep into a topic or doing certain technical searches brings up SEO hell/malicious PDFs worse than Google ever does.

Yes it is. I have tried 6 others and all of them give much much worse results in lots of cases. It won’t matter if you search something popular, but otherwise you notice the difference.

If Apple popped up a list on install of search engines to pick from, 99% of people would pick Google anyway. Google is mostly afraid they will buy a startup and have their own or make the same deal with M$. At $15B of pure bottom line, it is an easy choice for Apple. We can only stop this with taxes on digital advertising. The tracking companies have become too good at fingerprinting. Even if everything was completely random and anonymized from the iPhone side, the carriers/ISPs can fingerprint you so much easier and they'll never stop (probably not even with regulation).

Google search is completely gamed, as are Bing and others that rely on the same list of ranking factors. Besides the visual difference between Bing/Google results page, I doubt iPhone users would be able to tell who was serving the results.

"Like, Apple does not sell user data to third parties and Apple is sending all search traffic to Google by default for $15B a year."

Or like, Mozilla is working to protect user privacy^1 and Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default for [much less than $15B] a year.

In each case, we can see two conflicting interests/objectives. Data collection versus privacy protection. Being honest, which is the one we can say is making the most progress at the expense of the other. How much data is being collected. How much data is off-limits. How much money is being "lost" by "tech" companies to privacy protection (user self-determination). Be honest.

1 And other noble causes, including maintaining a "healhty" web. Read: Ensuring online advertising does not die out.

I'm sure it's net positive for users in both cases.

Apple doesn't sell Google data of users' actions on other websites or in other apps.

And Mozilla really did a lot for user privacy using that Google money.

>Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default for...much less

And not just much less overall...

Mozilla is supposedly getting ~$400M/year. Which is $115M per percentage point of marketshare. The $15B for Apple is $804M per percentage point of marketshare.

Which I suppose makes sense, as iPhone users probably automatically fall into a high income demographic.

What I used for market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Even if a user pivots from Safari, keeping Google as the default is keeping it as the default in the minds of users as they move to a different browser.

> Apple does not sell user data to third parties

Oh, of course they do:

> Apple’s Sharing of Personal Data

> Apple may share personal data with service providers who act on our behalf, our partners, or others at your direction. Further, Apple does not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

> Partners. At times, Apple may partner with third parties to provide services or other offerings. For example, Apple financial offerings like Apple Card and Apple Cash are offered by Apple and our partners. Apple requires its partners to protect your personal data.

They share it, they just don't share your data “with third parties for their own marketing purposes”, no additional privacy guarantees.

source: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

None of that describes selling data to third parties. The third parties that might receive data as described in this section are vendors or partners, not customers. Apple isn't making money off the sale of data here.

> Apple isn't making money off the sale of data here.

There's zero mention of that in the aforementioned policy. This policy completely allows them to make money in their deals with their «partners» or even their «service providers» and you wouldn't know it.

For instance, Apple pay is a payment service and I would be really surprised if they didn't get paid by their partner for every transaction made through them. (And yes, a transaction is «personal data»).

And since they are a for profit company, they obviously intend to make money (even if it's not through their partner paying them directly but through indirect revenue sources like customer retention or acquisition) when making partnership, because otherwise they wouldn't make such partnerships!

Google and Facebook also don't sell data. They keep the data and charge advertisers to take advantage of their ability to target using the data.

Apple makes it easy enough to switch the "search engine used from the URL bar" if you care to.

It's kind of like how the NSA has deals with other countries like the UK to allow spying on Americans to get around constitutional issues. Hey, we didn't do the spying! We're privacy focused. We just make billions by allowing other companies to spy on you, and we make it the default position. Plausible deniability at the corporate level.

Could one do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on a user acquisition cost for Google?

15b USD/year / 500 m users = 30 USD/user/year

3 searches/user/day = 1000 searches/user/year

30 USD/user/year / 1000 searches/user/year = 0.03 USD/search

AFAIK, 0.03 USD per search (or impression) is in the right ballpark for advertising.

------------------------

Data used (retrieved from Google) 446m Safari users. An average user searches on Google 3 - 4 times per day.

My digging indicates that Apple has 1.65B active devices as of Q1 2021. The vast majority (1B) are iPhone users, and I suspect the vast majority of iOS users use Safari.

Sounds like Google is getting a pretty good deal.

Every iPhone user is a safari user AFAIK.

AFAIK on iOS you cannot distribute an alternative browser (as in UI, network engine and rendering engine) --- you can only distribute what is essentially a skin over the default browser, Safari.

But those skinned browsers can have a different default search engine

On iOS you have to use their JS virtual machine and their HTML5 renderer. I think you can write your on UI and possibly network engine (although that might be locked down as well, but you can definitely proxy all the results.

Google is not the default search engine in China.

You have to include the cost of preventing competitors to get bigger. If Google loose its monopoly on search Google as a whole might collapse

Might be skewed a bit by the fact that iPhone users are generally more affluent.

I can't recall the source of how much Google makes per CPM on average, but it's significantly higher than all other search engines. If the deal is cheap/value for anyone, it's Google. It may have been in the UK CMA report on search/online advertising, IIRC it was between $30 and $50 CPM with Bing on around half that.

If my arithmetic is right, 1.5bn searches would increase DDG's number of searches 15 fold. It would seem only Bing is potentially capable of putting in a bid similar to Google's.

Until DDG starts serving results from their own index, they are essentially a privacy-branded Bing.

If only I could pay Google $30 / year to opt out of their data collection schemes.

I’m fairly sure a lot of folks would sign up at even $30/month, if any product managers are reading this.

This would be an interesting product especially to those who are relatively price insensitive such as companies.

One of the perks of working for us is a google no-ads subscription! could work?

I suspect that what people want with "No data collected" is too nebulous to be actionable, at $30/ month or any price. Youtube Premium is something actionable, "I don't want adverts". OK then, no adverts, done for the price.

If you try to take it literally it blows up immediately. Who aren't we collecting data about? We can't very well have data like login credentials for a user we don't collect data about, so...

I would pay a lot more than 30

Give me back the advanced search operators and I'm in for 3 figures/month.

Sort of reminds me how I can’t get a digital newspaper without ads, regardless of what I’m willing to pay, or how every cable tv provider in my region has unskippable ads in on demand and (soon) recorded tv programs, regardless of what I pay. The content industries are very much stuck in a “content must be financed through advertising” mindset, and google seems trapped with them. I can easily imagine a paid privacy-first google premium service that strips out google ads across the internet, and I would pay for it, but apparently google’s imagination is more limited. So now I just use ad blockers.

Yeah, that's an average though. If you don't hesitate about spending $30, you're probably worth a lot more to advertisers.

If you have disposable income to spend $30 on an internet service, it's likely you also have a mortgage. Mortgage search ads alone are around $10 a click IIRC.

With 75% gross margin, it would bring the opt out price to $120/year. Would you still want to opt out at that price?

Here. [1] I saved you $30 a year.

[1] "Turn Web & App Activity on or off" https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...

Isn't this one of those sneaky "we'll still harvest your data we just won't save it to your account activity viewer" type deals?

What evidence could I or anyone else offer that would convince you?

I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm genuinely curious what you think could convince you. Perhaps you could get a job at Google and investigate the relevant code?

This came from documents unsealed in Google v. Oracle.

Opting out of that doesn't mean Google stops tracking you. Only some parts of its machinery stop. Even Google's own employees have no idea which parts collect which data.

To all those downvoting, read yourselves https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/unredacted-suit-...

I'm not this does anything for privacy though. In my tin-foil hat mode, I think they take your data and use it how ever they want. If you have this enabled, they do these "local to you" type of things, and if it is disabled then it goes to the main search. However, that does not prevent them from saving that data linked to you in another table/database. It just means you no longer get the "benefit", but you never prevent Googs from benefiting.

On a similar note, assuming this is done with a default=‘true’, would this not be a contender for the most expensive code per letter ever?

I think part of it is user acquisition and another is preventing another competitor to gain traction.

I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here. In practice I suspect this is really just google paying apple $15B not to compete with its golden goose.

I really think you underestimate how hard it is to "roll a search engine" the size of Google or Bing. Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

No offence but I think you’re wrong. Apple could buy Duck Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it good enough or do the first search on the default search engine.

Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal directly with Microsoft? It’s not like Microsoft won’t know Apple bought Duck when it’s time to renew the contract anyways.

Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names

I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing and Google's search engines and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing, and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple.

They could buy another search engine, but again getting Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still honestly a massive project.

I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on other things.

I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one) but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with the results and try the query on Google, it's no better there.

Are you sure you don’t have predisposition to that conclusion?

> and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine.

I'm curious, can you share which one?

I remember recent conversations (in June) about search engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_ DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to “tank man” (not the imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with it). That highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might have delegate or contract some aspects of it.

It’s not like Apple to not control everything, but they could do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on top of that, but is based on Bing.

Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time sounds like a massive win to me.

I think with billions of dollars in funding they could accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally. They don't need to be as good as google.

Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware.

Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your customers find your software inferior.

Safari would be evidence against this.

I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?

Google managed it 20 years ago.

Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space. (Estimating from Moores law.)

Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a technical perspective.

> Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683

You can safely assume that for any critical external dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.

A valid point, but I wonder how effective Apple's search engine will be with their stance on user privacy. I'm sure Apple is perfectly content with letting Google do the dirty work.

I don't think there's risk of apple building a successful search engine that can compete with Google, but just paying for Mac users who are not savvy enough to change their default browser to Google. (or bribe against going with Duck.com)

DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier and better for them to accept the $15B.

DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.

>DuckDuckGo is literally Bing

How so?

In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the search results back and displays them. (adding its own quick results and ads)

Oh, I see. Thanks.

I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help page:

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

They have their own crawler as well, and there are a bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding to.

To me that page always reads as if it tries to play up their own contribution, which until there is more detail makes me suspicious if the main results are meaningfully influenced by them, or if it's "just" infoboxes etc.

Maybe, but I also think basically saying "well, it just spits out Bing results" is over simplifying. There's probably somewhere in the middle, as I said, I suspect Bing results are a pretty large chunk of it but I also try not to just hyperbolically state things ya know?

I don't believe "it's bing results with added extras around them" is hyperbolical, given how similar DDG and Bing results look everytime I try it. If it's wrong, DDG would IMHO do themselves a favor by sharing more details here.

Surely someone out there has a paper on comparative search engine results.

That page is intentionally misleading. They list crawled websites as 'sources'.

If DuckDuckGo claims to have over hundreds sources, then Bing and Google have over billions of sources by the same definition.

I tried to switch to using DuckDuckGo and found it basically unusable. Essentially the same quality as Bing. Maybe slightly better, but not by much.

That's because DuckDuckGo is essentially a reskin of Bing search. They don't do their own indexing save for a few token websites.

I want a search engine that returns results solely on the terms of the query. I'm so tired of search engines thinking they know what I want to see based on my history. Not only do I question the validity of the results when they are so subject to change, I also worry I'm missing something.

"Hey, Google, what can I use to replace white bean paste?" "Hoisin sauce is a great replacement for white bean sauce!"

"Hey, Google, things have gone weird in macOS 12, how fix?" "MACOS 4 was RELEASEd in 1912 AWKWARDLy with A spanner"

I get that search is a hard problem but they are spectacularly bad at it for being the best.

Didn’t this already happen at one point? At least for Siri results I know it did. I feel like it happened on Safari too but it might just have been Siri results.

[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-aw...

I remember this! You'd ask Siri to search for something, and you'd get back Bing results. I thought it was odd because I had never (at the time) used Bing for anything at all.

That said, I haven't used an iOS device in some time, and didn't know if that ever changed to Google or another service(Siri search results).

And it's additional $15B R&D fund for Apple to improve its own search system that I can't imagine it's been developing for many years now behind the scenes.

I wish Apple would roll their own- free of ads. But hey- $15B is a lot of money.

It doesn't have to be by default. Like many other preferences Apple asks when it pushes a new version of iOS or macOS, why couldn't this be a choice for users?

Apple did switch to Bing at one point. The default search engine in Safari is likely just a matter of money to them.

Apple already competes with Google in some search verticals, for example if you ask Siri to find a pizza restaurant, you will get an iOS pop-up with results that link to Yelp for reviews and Apple Maps for directions.

I don’t see Apple competing directly against Google in general-purpose search. But I could definitely see them expanding what iOS does “natively” to include Siri handling more queries itself rather than punting out to Google results.

Which is honestly super annoying on iOS Safari because if you want to highlight and search for something on a page you have to go to the lookup screen, which will almost always be empty, and then click the web search button.

do they have a deal with yelp? i wish i could swap out tripadvisor as the default for maps results

I wouldn't mind it if it didn't force me to install the Yelp app to see more details/photos. They must have some kind of deal.

Apple is rolling out their own reviews system so I expect Yelp and the other sources to be phased out in the coming years.

I dearly hope so. It's the only thing I don't like about Apple Maps.

It seems to be at least partially content-related, because I've seen both Yelp and TripAdvisor in Apple Maps.

Well Apple isn't exactly known for giving things away for free, so putting Yelp as the top-tier result in Apple Maps is a pretty good indicator that a deal was made.

Apple understands and knows how to build customer devices and products. They have no understanding of web and infrastructure. Building search engine is way beyond their competency as an organization.

I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.

... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it.

I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience?

Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.

> I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain?

Giant piles of money

> in terms customer experience?

This being the top concern doesn't really mesh with the game theory of google giving them $15B. If everyone believed UX was apple's primary concern, and that google was the best option, then google would not have to pay.

Unless it makes more than 15B for Apple in terms of being able to do something with their own search (advertising?), it is a loss.

Google is paying for Apple to not have the default be Google search. If Google wasn't paying, Apple would be able to offer the default search provider to someone else or make it a user selectable choice in the new phone setup.

Google is paying to keep Apple from thinking about their own provider or shifting the default to Bing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/297137/mobile-share-of-u...

Organic search from a mobile device is 60% of all Google searches. If we take the 50/50 breakdown for iOS vs Android and apply it there, 1/3rd of all google searches are from iOS.

That's what Google is paying for - making sure that people who don't care about their search provider continue to make up 1/3 of all of their searches (and data gathering).

The next thing to consider back on that "what would the expense gain" ... does Apple have the resources to spin up a 1/3 google data center. I mean, yea they do... but that's expensive and if they aren't selling adds, it is purely an expense.

I tend to expect Apple would easily make 15B on searches just doing keyword relevance without any tracking

That would be very cuil.

Apple could buy duckduckgo to go along/try to regain their privacy branding. Yea, duckduckgo has a lot of work to do to get to google level(afaik they're just a bing skin atm), but it'd be a decent start.

I doubt they would want to buy a search engine that heavily relies on Bing.

They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them learning about them and eventually dominating.

I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one. They have built a position on customer privacy and moving into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.

They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.

That’s fair, fortunately those don’t matter as much.

It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all the money in the world, and yet their online services suck.

Those are very different worlds, that require organizations built in very different way.

Apple has so much money that they can be whatever they want to be. Didn't they say they have around $200B of cash on hand earlier this year?

[1] says $204B around April time, yep.

[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-every...

Google search sucks nowadays anyway comapared to 20 years ago.

right. it does. besides, Google paid since initial release of Safari when Cupertino had decided what the final design/functions of Safari were going to be -- seems many forgot about that as well as where and when Goo blunt and boldly went headhunting for new staff and peeps in p2p underground in the days Carracho was about to become -- very briefly -- a much fancied p2p-client

Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs. It is a matter of brute work basically, an army of programmers. CPU design is a lot more sophisticated.

Not really. The vast majority of CPU design is just logic in Verilog/VHDL, similar to software.

> Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs

Not for Apple - they have hardware excellence in their DNA, but the web and internet services aren't a core competency (yet?). They have made huge strides from the disaster that was MobileMe, but they are nowhere close to where the Bing or Google search teams are.

> hardware excellence in their DNA

Yes, thats why my $4000 macbook pro keyboard inserts double keys strokes on 50% of key presses. The excellence must all be in the magic touchbar that periodically stops working so I cant even use vim because the ESC key is on a broken touch screen.

...and that's their wheelhouse. Now imagine how much of a shitshow MobileMe really was.

> I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine

IMHO, that's the play behind Neeva[1], to be acquired by Apple. But will Apple give up the sweet, sweet $$$$$ it gets from Google, just to roll its own?

[1] https://www.neeva.com/

Destroying Google dominance in search market will thoroughly damage the company, reducing it to a husk of its former self. This would enormously weaken Apple competitor, strongly improving its market power. It’s most definitely worth to Apple more than $15B/year, as long as they can pull it off, and can avoid antitrust.

> I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine.

For a long time Siri searches were powered by Bing.

> But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here

I think this is even more outlandish than switching to Bing.

Google Search accounted for $100B in revenues. iOS has ca. 14% browser market share. Assuming that mobile users search as much or are as valuable as desktop searchers, then that suggests iOS users generate ca. $14B in revenue. Of course, it's likely iOS users are more valuable than the average Google user, but it gives a rough run of the numbers.

Google is happy to pay all of this revenue back to Apple so that they don't suffer indirectly in other parts of the business by having an Apple competitor or with Bing as default.

Apple on the other hand needs to generate this value from a standing start. It's difficult to see how they'd feasibly get to > $15B net monetization on such a massive and risky undertaking.

Compare this payment to the statement of Google that "alternatives are just one click away" in the context of search engine competition.

Pretty hard to square the notion that value delivered, not defaults and market power matter when you pay 15 billion for that one click

I think you're just seeing the value of being the first click.

I doubt many people change the default search engine on their device/browser, so it must be worth it for Google.

Whenever I speak to my mother she refers to the web as "Google" because it's the entrypoint to everything she does online. She doesn't type URLs, she goes to websites by typing them into the Google search box and clicking through (often the top result which is usually an ad)

With the omnibox on chrome, firefox and mobile, this is pretty much everyone now, isn't it?

My mother refers to the internet as "the computer." She'll say, "I found this cool new thing on the computer."

Considering how big Apple is already ($80 billion per QUARTER!) the idea that they could at some point still decide to add a search engine and the associated revenues is amazing to me. It obviously wouldn't be a 1-to-1 switch with Google traffic coming from Apple devices but if they seriously attempted it I don't see how it wouldn't be a very substantial business very quickly.

Presumably this payment is based on Google's evaluation of the search ad value attributed to Apple devices but only $3.75 billion per quarter still seems low for how much iPhone search traffic there must be? Especially considering the relatively lower level of iPhone ad blocking vs. desktop I see anecdotally in my non-tech friends. I imagine though that both companies send in fairly deadly teams of apex negotiators for a deal like this so it must be close to representing the true economic value of the tie-up...

I would also imagine that iPhone users are above average value for advertisers because of their spending behaviour.

Monetising mobile search would also require Apple to develop a very strong advertising platform. Doing that would put them in direct conflict with themselves over privacy, either they'd have to compromise privacy to benefit their ad business, or their ad business would be significantly less attractive to advertisers. In practice this would make it very hard for them to monetise search anywhere near as well as Google can, maybe 5 to 1. So if mobile search is worth say $30bn to Google, it might be worth $6bn to Apple.

Combined with the high costs of building both a search engine and an ad platform, and this would result in a massive revenue hit for Apple. I don't see how any vaguely realistic numbers lead to them benefiting from it, at least for quite a long time.

They don’t have to necessarily deeply monetize to be successful, apple could play dumb and offer ad results based on search terms only. DuckDuckGo does similar and I do wonder at scale what kind of revenue this could end up being. Google doesnt behave in an entirely pro-business way as well. Google ads are not market efficient at the moment, with competitors taking keywords that are company names for example, forcing businesses to spend to be the first option even if the user searches your business’ exact name. Eliminating just a few insulting Google search behaviors and limiting data tracking could be a nice revenue stream

They have far far lower revenue per impression than strongly targeted ads using ML.

Success means revenue of at least $15bn plus the cost of operating the search service and ad network. Anything less is a revenue hit.

I find it interesting that you consider the mob-like behavior of Google forcing everyone to bid on their own name "not efficient". It seems to me like they are really efficient (at their goal of extracting tons of revenue from everyone and their dog).

I think that Apple would only consider building their own search engine if they had the ability to generate (close to) these $15B per year in value.

Since Apple wants to keep its privacy-friendly brand, these $15B would have to come from something other than ads; and I can't think of another realistic source of revenue. But who knows, the whole "vertical integration" aspect could unlock new scenarios...

You are suggesting that Apple wouldn't touch ads, but that's exactly what they did with IAd

I can't find how much revenue Apple is generating from iAd, but all hints point to a fairly small number. I'm guessing that Apple keeps it around to "help" small app developers who build free apps.

And more importantly, iAd seems to focus on advertising apps themselves (like a game ad inside another game). This is a far less intrusive model than a general-purpose search engine (where you find all kinds of advertisers).

iAd failed.

They tried to launch premium ads...

The launch definitely was not focused on "small developers" too.

While keeping 40%, i don't think they were generous at for the "small companies" ;)

So I really don't know how you can get to that conclusion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd

> if they seriously attempted it I don't see how it wouldn't be a very substantial business very quickly.

I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph. Are you saying Apple could build its own search engine?

Possibly it could. But it's not just about throwing money at it. Do you remember when Google didn't brag about how big a DC footprint they had? It was all hush hush.

Microsoft struggled to bring up a search engine. They even licensed part of it. Some of the queries sent on live.com (as bing was called back then) were actually sent out to third party search providers.

Then Microsoft started bragging about how they're able to operate just like Google, too.

... then Google turned on search-as-you-type, or whatever it was called. The one where you see search results after every keystroke (since removed, because it was kinda pointless). That feature was basically a big FU to Microsoft, saying "we can 10x our search traffic overnight. Can you?".

Google reportedly stopped being secret about its capacity because the secrecy was there to prevent Microsoft truly understanding the scale needed to compete. Once they did understand, Google stopped being so secret.

Apple is years behind. They don't have shovels in the ground. They don't operate services at this scale.

Sure, they are not a small shop. But they outsource so many things in this space.

Microsoft started from a much better position, but they still took years to not be a joke in this space.

But yeah, with Apple building DCs, you should maybe expect them to have a reasonable replacement ready in 5-10 years, if they really put their mind to it.

And then there's the ad side. It's not just the tech (where Google has a 20 year head start), but also the business deals (where again 20 years head start), the inertia of existing advertisers, and integration of search ads and display ads.

But of course, with a closed ecosystem, and actually being the biggest private company in the world, they will absolutely get more monopoly accusations for integrating search, app store, and phone, than Google has.

So no, you can actually throw billions and billions at this problem and still fail. It's not obvious to me that such an investment will have positive ROI for 10 years.

I think the vast majority of people would not know the difference between a Google search and a DuckDuckGo search. They use search to shop the top few retailers or find the actual website of a company, but I doubt many are doing the deep dives that it might actually make a difference to use Google with.

Google’s moat right now is Maps, YouTube, and Drive apps, I think.

Or at least that is my family’s experience. Google search and gmail were easily replaced.

You're focusing on the quality of results, though. That I think is actually the easiest problem, to the point where I didn't even list it.

Remember when Google+ launched, and Microsoft as a joke created a clone in a week or so? That was completely missing the point about what's hard.

Or how "make a twitter clone" is basically the "hello world" of web apps. If it's just you and your friends on it, actually yes you can make a twitter clone that you can basically not tell the difference, and you can do that in a weekend (another weekend to make the app).

To make a twitter clone for 10 people you can run it on your laptop. For 1000 people you buy a VM in some cloud. For a billion apple devices you need world wide pops, fibre deals, plots of land, construction companies, resource planning, legal teams, government contracts, etc...

Again, Apple could possibly do this. But this is not their core skill. And do you know what happens when a company throws billions on not their core skill? Google+ happens.

Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to handle Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for technical reasons?

I do not know enough about what goes into delivering people search results worldwide. I just know that my family’s experience switching to DuckDuckGo has been seamless, but I also do not know how representative our search behavior is.

DDG is just a frontend to bing's results

Why would it be difficult to scale?

I assumed it would not be difficult to scale. I was asking knorker why they thought it might not scale, as that is what I thought their comment implied.

> Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to handle Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for technical reasons?

Right, I think they would not. Not without A LOT of work, on all sides of the business.

If you have a 1qps service, you can scale 100x[1] fairly easily. If you have 1kqps[2] then scaling that to 100kqps is a different beast alltogether. Every single design in load balancing decision, TCP termination, request routing, peering aggreements, geolocation, backend load balancing, and failover, can be assumed to be wrong.

Or if not wrong, then at least untested and many parts will not survive first contact with the enemy.

And that's just to get the SEARCH working at all.

Remember, in order to replace Google's $15B you probably want some sort of revenue, too. And revenue of $15B+cost of service.

So… ads?

Google has buildings and buildings full of people doing nothing but ads. They have presence in pretty much every major city in the world. No, I'm not just talking about the engineering offices that are well known.

To ask Apple to create a search engine is actually to ask them to create "A Google" (except Cloud).

According to the latest earnings report Google spends about $160B and Search ads takes in about $120B. These numbers are not comparable, since they are different level line items. But it should be kept in mind that a very naive reading of this means that yes, Apple has $195B in the bank, but if they tried to "just create a Google" then they'd be broke in just over a year.

Especially since it would be MUCH more expensive and risky to build this in one big shot, than to organically grow it at great profit over many years.

Maybe better to get an earnings report from Google pre-cloud, when it was essentially an ads company by income and investment. Of course it won't be comparable unless Apple decides to also do an ad network. Which they probably would because if you have the tech and the customers, then it's free money.

But you said technical reason. So let's scratch ads, and never mind the money. Yeah, they could be able to do that. It's not clear to me how much of their search index they actually own, though. They say they have a crawler[3], but it sure also reads like "we're just a frontend for Bing". Truth is probably somewhere in between.

So what do you think MSFT would say if Apple started hammering Bing (albeit indirectly) for search results, sans ads? Or even with ads?

So duckduckgo is good because they don't actually have their own index. Bing took years to not be ridiculous (it's good now). We saw Cuil completely fail, even full of ex-googlers.

All this to say: Writing their own search engine is hard (see Bing, and how much MSFT plowed into that to make it work), and DDG can't just be used as a backend. And switching to DDG is just throwing $15B in the lake and giving it to someone else for free.

[1] that's the order of magnitude difference between google and ddg according to https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-alternativ..., of course that doesn't take into account that this would only move apple traffic, but I like the round number.

[2] 1.5B per month is about 578 per second, and with seasonality that it at least 1kqps at peak.

[3] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Why couldn't they use AWS? They already do for iCloud.

Reportedly not just AWS: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/report-apple-is-g...

Admittedly they don't have to vertically integrate, and they wouldn't pay list prices if they use any other cloud.

But honestly, if the idea is to get off of Google search, what exactly is the gain by relying on a third party albeit at a lower level?

You have to ask yourself: Is running a search engine the best thing that Apple could be doing with its time? Is the fact that they don't run their own search engine a danger to their core business?

In the end it comes down to projected cost and income, and obviously I'm not in a position to calculate either one for Apple, not being in the room with their ruthless negotiators.

But yeah, the starting point of dropping google is losing out on these $15B. So already that's what you have to work with. And then the cost of public cloud egress traffic, which is famously ridiculously expensive.

Your comment seems a bit like "why don't they just…", which seems a bit naive when dealing with business at this scale.

The deep dives don't work anymore on Google search. It's all content spam.

Then I am not sure what Google search is useful for. I personally have not needed to use it in a long time.

> I think the vast majority of people would not know the difference between a Google search and a DuckDuckGo search.

One has a small static duck. The other has a colorful name that is usually replaced by pictures for a day. It's very obvious.

They already do.

If you’re on iOS, swipe down and use that search bar.

Substantial how? Apple doesn’t sell ads and I’m pretty sure that antithetical to their business model, if they did their advantage in other ways (privacy which sucks anyways) would dry up.

Apple build advertisement profiles on iOS users, and allow App Store and Apple News ads to be targeted using said profiles. They are estimated to sell billions of dollars of ads per year. Their tracking is, as far as I can tell, not opt in. Instead it's an opt-out hidden in an obscure settings menu, with the sign "beware of the Leopard" on the door.

See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223

So it absolutely isn't antithetical to their business model. The opposite: Apple's business model is to lock users to their platform, and extract rent out of as much of their economic activity as possible. If anything, third party advertisers making money from iOS users directly without giving Apple a cut is what's antithetical to Apple's business model.

It seems basically guaranteed that within a couple of years Apple will be doing another attempt at launching an ad network for third party apps and/or web sites (Safari-only) using the same tracking data.

Apple does sell search ads. Search the App Store for almost anything…

That is a shocking amount. Consider that google purchased YouTube for less than 2 billion.

And while I know YouTube wasnt the behemoth then, I find it hard to believe that it is only worth 1 month of google being the default.

And only for macintosh users! And only macintosh users who use safari! And only macintosh users who use safari who don't change the default search engine!

I am curious what that amounts to per user per year.

That was in 2006. Back then a billion dollars was a lot of money, nowadays it's pre-launch valuation for a startup that has at least one MIT dropoff.

That made me chuckle.

  "And only for macintosh users!
  And only macintosh users who use safari!
  And only macintosh users who use safari who don't change the default search engine!"

Rather more users than that:

> to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Indeed the Mac is a rounding error at Apple.

> Back in January of this year, Apple confirmed there were 1.65 billion active Apple devices at the time, with iPhone alone accounting for one billion.

They're only selling 5-6m Macs per quarter. [2] They sold 90m iPhones in Q4 of 2020. Extrapolating from this, roughly speaking, that would mean of the 1.65B Apple devices, 100m are Macs.

[1] https://screenrant.com/android-vs-apple-active-devices-globa...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

> Consider that google purchased YouTube for less than 2 billion

That was a long time ago (15 years ago IIRC).

And back then, YT was:

    a) much smaller than today
    b) certainly not a sure bet moneymaker
    c) a huge infrastructure (especially B/W) money sink

I don't think you are comparing things that are comparable.

The considerations that would inform such an agreement are far beyond my comprehension. I suppose we may draw the lesson from the presumptive wisdom of this decision that software defaults are very important (hobbyist developers take note!) and also that large figures ought to be nice, round numbers.

For comparison, Google appears to be paying Mozilla about $400M/year. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-extends-its-go...

Wow! You'd think with that kind of money they'd be able to fix 10 year old bugs in Firefox.

What the hell is that money going towards?

> What the hell is that money going towards?

Probably a really expensive dustpan for all the salt that people throw at them.

Company wide vacations.

I actually find this fascinating as it puts a dollar figure on it.

It’s similar to the FDA priority voucher market. If you get a drug approved by the FDA for a neglected disease, you get a transferable voucher that gets you a priority FDA review for whatever drug you use it for. It might accelerate approval by 3-6 months.

What’s that worth? Well the vouchers have sold for $100-250M lately.

https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/sanofi-nets-valuable-fda...

> Well the vouchers have sold for $100-250M lately.

Not to dismiss what you are saying, but "I can get regulatory approval for my drug faster" seems like it got far more valuable in the past, I dunno, 20-21 months or so.

If you’re referring to Covid vaccines I’m not sure the vouchers would have made much difference. The FDA moved as fast as possible.

The COVID vaccines took priority over everything (rightly so). But that meant that the FDA had less time to approve anything else, so priority still became more valuable.

Ahh.. but I’m pretty sure a public health emergency would negate the voucher anyways.

I didn't mean the voucher would let you cut in front of the vaccine. The vaccine work didn't occupy 100% of the FDA. Let's say it ate up 75%. Well, the vouchers probably worked on the other 25%. And because there is a lot less available time, the vouchers are more valuable.

I mean, imagine they have space for only one non-COVID review in 2020. Can you imagine how much that would be worth?

>Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up from $10 billion in 2020.

>Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely “paying to ensure Microsoft doesn’t outbid it.”

The numbers just dont make any sense, both from Google's Traffic acquisition cost and Apple services revenue. And I know both number fairly well.

I sometimes wonder if I could apply to be an analyst considering most, at least most of them ever came into mainstream media tends to be so wrong on tech.

Could you elaborate what number would make sense?

The total payment to Apple is roughly inlined with Apple's growth on total active devices using Google. i.e Devices excluding China. [0] So every two to three years you will read how Google is paying more to Apple. Except Active Devices hasn't grown much at all. Google is effectively paying 50% premium to Apple to outbid a hypothetical Microsoft bid.

CPA Cost per acquisition are already lower for Bing, and Microsoft is running with lower margin. Traffic acquisition costs for Google has been steady. And if it is a dramatic 50% increase, I am pretty sure there will be some words on it in their Quarterly Report.

In the past if this was coming from those usual suspect of Apple's PR site, you can instantly tell it is Apple's propaganda machine in the work. And this isn't the first time [1] they are doing it to put pressure on both companies either. But this time it is coming from "analyst".

To put $15B into perspective Google will be paying 10% of their annual revenue to Apple.

There is a possibility that Apple is trying to recope a potential lost of App Store revenue which is included in the same services category as the search deal.

[0] I actually believe it is closer to active user than active devices. Since a single user could have two or more Apple devices. But active devices is the only figure that Apple publish so we use that to keep things simple.

[1] https://searchengineland.com/report-google-apple-safari-sear...

If they pay 15billion, the revenue number must be astronomic, very curious to know the net revenue for this. It's valuable to Google anyway, as part of branding pr.

Can't wait to read https://twitter.com/techemails in 10 years

Apple needs to invest heavily in DDG and make that the default. But then, they'd probably Dark Sky it.

Isn't DDG just a bing api client?

No.

So if it's true that there are 1B active iPhone users, then Google pays $15 per user per year.

What you really want to ask about is the ARPU metric, or Average Revenue Per User:

https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...

Google gets revenues of about $256 per user per year, mostly from search ad impressions. That's the context for this $15 per user deal; their ROI is nearly 20x.

For context, Apple makes about $30 on services like iCloud per user; if you factor in hardware sales every 2 years or so their revenue is $194/user/year. Facebook makes about $112 per US/Canadian user. Amazon is the big ARPU winner, making $752 per user per year based on $120/year Prime memberships plus sellers giving them their fee of approximately 15% fee + $5 shipping prices.

Yes, indeed, I was curious to see these data.

Thanks for providing a link.

I guess Apple devices are probably responsible for a decent amount of the consumer web browsing in the world (iOS has 25-30% mobile device market share). I wonder if Apple is still going to launch a full search engine[1] and that might actually change the game (Bing has less than 3% search market share and Apple might instantly get 30%!) - and they're indexing a bunch due to Siri and stuff anyway.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/10/28/apple-b...

I really don't understand what would be the threat from Apple to Google if they don't pay. Build their own search engine as they did for google maps ? Send users to Bing ? Mac users would not be thrilled ...

Yes, the first line item you mention is rumored to be true. Apple has been apparently working on a search engine. Given their desire to subtly influence social mores while bowing out of true progressive change (beyond LGBTQ+ lip service and pretending to adopt diversity policies), while manifesting total inability to move past their puritanical fear of adult content or basically anything outside the superficial normie sphere of influence, I doubt it will be nuanced or have enough of a "wow factor" to be any better than AltaVista circa 1998 or to scoop up any following. Lol Siri can't even perform contextually relevant suggestive searches or respond in kind back with cues after giving a static response to a query. To think they have the bargaining power to compete with Google is silly, but it shows how Google just wants to throw money at this market (iOS devices) and fears the potential for a competitor to actually release a competing product.

Think different ™ *

* unless the think is too different

> Lol Siri can't even perform contextually relevant suggestive searches or respond in kind back with cues after giving a static response to a query

Siri doesn't know a thing about you, that's why you get "static responses".

Unlike Google, which uploads _everything_ to the cloud, most (if not all) of Apple's AI/Location/data mining stuff happens "on device", and it stays on that device. If you buy a new phone/tablet/computer, you're starting from scratch again, relearning frequent locations, charging habits, etc. The data isn't even backed up, so restoring your phone from a backup also means starting from scratch.

With iOS 15, Siri is also moving "on device", so i guess it has the means to become smarter (personalized) now, when it can actually do (on device) data mining. Still not backed up though, so new phone still means you start over.

Why don't they move the data from device to device?

Google isn't the company that throws 18B at a problem if it doesn't believe that not doing so wouldn't pose a substantial business risk.

Google need Apple user’s click stream data to rank the search results?

Losing $15B suddenly is indeed a massive threat. Apple shares would be bearish next day.

So would Google's share if they lost overnight the exclusive status of being the primary search engine, even more so than Apple.

Switching from one search engine to a strictly inferior one will be a hard sell to customers, but going from one search engine to a superior one privacy wise but inferior one results wise is justifiable.

So they could send users to Bing, but I think it's more likely they'll send users to an Apple-branded frontend to Bing (or some other "privacy-first" frontend to an existing search engine).

Safari already comes with DuckDuckGo as a suggested search engine, and all it takes is Apple flipping a switch for users that use the default search engine, and most of that traffic would go to DDG instead of Google.

Many Apple users are pragmatic, and don't care as long the search engine returns the results they want.

I've been using DDG for years, and it could be DDG has gotten better, or Google has gotten worse, but where i've occasionally had to do a "!g whatever" search to get google results because DDG made no sense, i actually often get better results with DDG these days.

It could be that you've adapted your search style to DDG as well. I tried making the switch, and my god was it frustrating.

I doubt 90% of people even have a search style. They are just searching to get to a brand’s website they might not know the exact spelling for. Or searching for a product sold by a limited amount of retailers.

I'm having the same experience as GP. I haven't changed my search style since the early 2000s, and Google search seems basically unusable for me at this point.

Yes I don't understand it either. There is zero serious competition to Google, so it would be a very hard sell for Apple to switch their users to a worse search engine.

The fact that Google is still unparalleled is also a mystery: why can't Bing be good? Why can't Amazon, or Apple with all their money, replicate the Google experience? This is weird.

Building a decent search engine requires query/clickstream data.

Google has more, so Google is better. Simple.

I don't know if I believe that. It sounds too similar to: "Building a decent search engine requires index data. Altavista has a bigger index, so Altavista is better. Simple."

Well that was true once. But people have higher standards for search engines now that they don't want to go through every result by hand, and therefore the main thing they're after is the ranking algorithm not the search algorithm.

Right, and maybe for the next generation of search engines it'll be something else again. Having the most query/clickstream data is what counts now, but there's no guarantee it will always count the most.

Would most user even realise they are on a different search engine? Or would they care about it enough when majority of it are now coming from Siri Search.

And if Apple partner with Bing and make an Apple's branded search engine ( like Yahoo ) while Bing pays ~$5B+ to Apple? Would user notice the results were slightly worse?

And Google lose 20% of user search traffic, and these 20% user base also happens to generate 30%+ of Ads revenue. i.e They are worth a bit more than others.

Apple is a media company that sells hardware, they don't need to spend time figuring out and maintaining search, especially if they've convinced Google to pay them that amount for the privilege.

It looks Google is ready to pay $15/year [1] for an Apple user and $2.5/year [2] for a Firefox user.

[1] $15bn/1bn apple devices

[2] $500m/200m firefox installs

Does this imply that there’s another search engine company willing to pay Apple $14B? Who’s that? (Microsoft, I guess?)

This is monopolistic collusion which regulators may well try to address in various ways indicated including interoperability. Self-evidently the deal suits Google and Apple. If Microsoft outbid Google then it would simply replace one bilateral deal of collusion between 2 of the 5 GAFAMs, with another.

All the other 4 search choices in Safari are Bing. Whatever they say (and some are more transparent than others) Duck, Ecosia and Yahoo are Bing. So you might argue the whole search choice menu is 3-way GAFAM collusion.

The way to help users, and indeed customers who use search advertising, would be to allow easy use of multiple search engines on browsers. I want to be able to easily use all or some of crawlers Google, Bing, Mojeek, syndicates Duck, Ecosia, Startpage and others like Brave .... with one click the way I can on Firefox, or in other ways. Wouldn't you like that?

No one search engine, or syndicate if you prefer to use those, can be the search or "answer" engine which will always be best. We get more value as users if we have a healthy market with multiple choices for search, and an easy way to use them all.

But then I would say this; self-disclosure CEO of Mojeek - an independent no-tracking search engine.

This is no different from Fast Food restaurants carrying Pepsi(or Coke) products exclusively.

If Microsoft outbid Google then it would simply replace one bilateral deal of collision between 2 of the 5 GAFAMs, with another.

Yes...Just like Pepsi can offer a fast food company a better deal to carry Pepsi products exclusively

This comment is a great example of whataboutism.

No the comment is to show that this is standard business practice that goes back further than any of us have been alive. BTW, MCDonalds has such a s sweet deal that they will never leave. AKA they will always pay the lowest price for the Coke syrups out of any of Coke's vendors. Giving you a cup, lid and straw cost more than filling up that cup with a Coke product.

Monopolistic practices indeed go back further than any of us have been alive, and so do most crimes. That doesn't mean it's not bad and shouldn't be fought against…

Excusing a bad situation by pointing to another situation equally bad doesn't make the situation less bad, it's just sophism. (And I won't even argue that there's at least an order of magnitude in the sums involved and that the consequences in terms of individual freedom of the two situations are of completely different scale,sibling comments have done so already).

I think there is a big difference in that there are only 2 mobile OSes and users stick with the same one for years.

Imagine there were only 2 restaurants and 99% of people went exclusively to the same one every day for years.

Mobile OSes are not restaurants. Believe it or not, but people are pretty happy with their mobile OSes. We've seen phone usage increase and stay very high. And people dish out up to $2k for new devices. People continue to spend a lot on phones and replace them often.

You can not like certain practices of Google or Apple or aspects of their privacy policy, but don't gaslight yourself by saying that somehow the average device consumer is terribly concerned or hurt in any meaningful direct way. Most people like their phones and when you get a well funded competitor like Blackberry or Amazon or even Google hardware, people shrug and go back to Samsung/Apple

I don't think a disagree. I think this is exactly what makes this so tricky. On the consumer side, users have a choice, pick their favorite, occasionally switch when they buy a new phone, and are generally content.

However on the supply side, there are 2 disjoint monopolies. You reach iOS users through Apple's monopoly on iOS distribution, and you reach Android users through Google's [near-]monopoly on Android distribution.

To continue the hurt analogy, it's the difference between there being 2 restaurant chains in every town and there being 1 restaurant chain for the Eastern US and a different chain for the Western US (and moving across the country cost $400-$800).

The question isn't whether people like their mobile OSs. It's whether there is meaningful competition in the mobile OS space.

The only two mobile OS providers of any significance colluding together is not a good indicator of meaningful competition.

That was practically the case in the early- to mid- 2000s with McDonalds and Burger King.

After the franchise wars, now all restaurants are Taco Bell.

Good point. Is that healthy? Perhaps you don't mind but I would like to be able to choose between Pepsi and Coke too; when buying for someone else. At least in most restaurants I can personally choose also from other brands with more healthy products.

But thre are literally millions of fast food restaurants to choose from, accessible to everyone.

In mobile space, we basically have two OSes with their default browsers and search engine, and in browser space we have three, and all of them basically use one of the two search engines (and their derivatives).

There are millions of websites to choose from. The best (most convenient to reach) places in cites or on highways will be the big chains.

> This is no different from Fast Food restaurants carrying Pepsi(or Coke) products exclusively.

No it's not. No soft drink has 91% market share.

Firefox presents Yandex search by default for me. I guess Yandex outbid Google in my country.

DuckDuckGo is good and getting better while Google is mire bloated and irrelevant by the minute…

So, Whenever I help a friend with their iDevice the first thing I do is change default searching to DDG.

End game: Google stops paying Apple and Apple buys DDG.

I tried switching to DDG three times over last 6 years, and I always move back after I end up adding !g every second time when searching because the results are outrageously irrelevant. DDG does not understand me as Google does, bad or good thing it might be.

I had the exact opposite result. I've been using DDG for about 2 years and I rarely use Google now.

Even when DDG does well, very often I'll still add in a second search with !g in case Google has an even better result. Some searches have one answer (what's the population of Paris), whereas some searches have multiple answers and you want to pick the best result(s) (how to do x).

You should feed your own ego a bit more and make their devices vote for Trump on next election because you seem to know better what they need. DDG is cool and usable but to go that far and change my family's or friends default SE with something else which is inferior, unexpected and uncalled for is just..rude to say the least. A tool is a tool and people should use the best there is otherwise you're just putting them on a competitive disadvantage in life since we use a SE for almost anything these days.

You're like the human version of malwarebytes. Sure I'll fix your computer, but I'm going to change your default search engine, oh you don't mind this toolbar either do ya? Bonzi Buddy over here.

And I always switch it to something else... $15B wasted as far as I matter. :-)

I don't understand how this is legal. Seems like blatantly anticompetitive behaviour. Isn't it still dumping if the price of your product is so low that it is negative?

I find it interesting that the value of the ~18% of market share is $15B to google. I'm sure there's a further breakdown to ascertain the value of a single user.

Presumably Apple gets some value from not going with Bing, and the price may meet in the middle to an extent.

Seems like a lot. I wonder how Google do the analysis to decide that it's worth it or how many people use search through Safari instead of Google's app.

Presumably this compensation by Google is pure profit for Apple. If so, that might explain why Apple hasn't developed its own search engine.

it's not that they will instantly switch to ddg or bing or yandex and provide inferior results

it's that if google doesnt pay or tries to negociate too hard apple will know that revenue stream is not guaranteed anymore and might implement their own alternative

some doubdt that a competitor could overtake google, but yandex has image search/facial recognition capabilities miles ahead of what google offers

Do we really think Apple will launch its own privacy protecting search engine if the opportunity cost is 15B and counting?

It would be nice to see Apple use some of that money to update Safari to be more modern. Food for thought..

And that about sums up the argument why Apple isn't really serious about privacy. Your data is always up for sale if someone bids high enough. And $15 billion is easy to part with when Google considers Apple's market share, especially for mobile phones and all the delicious location data they emit.

> After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238317

What would Safari switch to if Google didn't pay?

DDG or Bing and some local options for eg Russia and China

You mean Apple would handle them $15B worth of value to Microsoft (or Yahoo? Isn't Bing just Yahoo reskinned with fancy wallpapers?) and Yandex for free? As for DDG, despite I myself like and use it, almost everyone whom I told said they are not satisfied with its search results. I doubt Apple is willing to harm their users satisfaction this way.

I would rather expect them to go introduce a search engine of their own. The Runnaroo author has proven it is possible and not even hard even for a single developer to build their own search engine and beat Google in terms of quality and UX.

Shouldn't this be illegal? Google already has a huge market share yet they using profits to keep /expand market share.

if this was Apple's only income (somehow), what market cap would that translate to?

Search is dead.

but what other option does Apple have anyway other than Google?

I had to reread and confirm that it’s $15B per year

Remember when Apple had to pay google … ios7 Apple Maps saga.

I wonder how they arrive at this. Does google have any pull in this? What other options does Apple have at this point? No other search engine comes close to google and people are really used to google's UI and changing that will be very bad for the UX which Apple really cares about.

Lest we forget...

August 6, 1997: In one of the most famous moments in Apple history, Steve Jobs reveals that Microsoft invested $150 million in its rival.

https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...

I'm not sure what the relevance of this is?

Yeah sorry I didn't explain it. I'm old enough to remember, but perhaps a lot of HN readers aren't.

It's just that $15 billion may seem like a lot of money today to most people and even to most corporations, but for Apple and Google, it's a footnote.

And yet, at one time in Steve Jobs' second tenure at Apple, just 1% of that quantum was the difference between Apple's survival and Apple's demise.

Here's a better telling of the story that provides context

https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/

and Walter Isaacson quoting how Jobs told it

https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/03/01/steve-jo...

Who uses search engines anymore?

Most new data is on Facebook/Twitter/Discord etc. Shoppers search on Amazon. Video consumers search on YouTube.

My point is that is must be *super easy* to build a search engine nowadays. You only need the best 10% of websites and you have got most of the quality content. Vast majority of websites are now irrelevant remains of the old internet.

Most searches could be answered by their Siri system.

Therefore Apple could build a functional search engine in months, and I guess they already have one ready to go for when it is needed.

> Who uses search engines anymore?

I do. It is a bas assumption to think all other, or even most of the other users, have similar usage habits as you are or are using the same services as you do, unless there are numbers to back the claims.

If this is true, wow, the Apple walled garden is big! This answers a question I had: why do people care about the Neural hash thing so much?

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