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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why wouldn't Apple accept a payment for bringing billions of dollars in traffic to Google?
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.
Google are paying tens of billions to keep them in the "default" dominant position because they know this.
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?).
(I don't like their font but that's an easy fix with userstyles.)
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
Users have preferences and may change the engines they search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.
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.
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.
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.
Well Google ofcourse clearly diasgree given they are willing to pay 15 billion dollars.
which is the point I was addressing in my original comment.
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.
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.
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
Better?