Hacker News Reader

Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"It's completely outrage driven and feeds on fearmongering: "google bad, we good, give us money"."

Indeed and yet they don't have any problem taking hundreds of millions of dollars from Google in exchange for letting Google be their default search engine.[1] Talk about cognitive dissonance.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/14/mozilla_google_search...

View on HN

The Mozilla that sows fear and asks for money is Mozilla Foundation. The Mozilla that takes hundreds of millions for Google is Mozilla Corporation. Mozilla Foundation owns Mozilla Corporation, but with one exception they don't share employees and have very different cultures and have independent marketing.

Sounds legit then, like FTX and Alameda.

Taking money for a thing that most people would probably set to the default anyway is pretty much "free money" and I wouldn't fault them for taking it.

Is there any search engine that approaches the quality of Google search results yet, or ideally, improves on them?

So you might as well take their money because they're a near monopoly anyways and in exchange for that money we will continue to make sure they stay a near monopoly? You don't see anything self-perpetuating in that? Why not duckduckgo or even startpage.com to least have an intermediary if they really care about these things?

They had Yahoo! as a default for a decent amount of time. The got out because promised quality improvements didn't materialize, according to court filings.

Monopolies eventually die. All of them. Believe it or not.

I don't think it's cognitive dissosance, if anything it showcases their point. Google is so dominant that even its competitors essentially exist only by virtue of being kept around by them.

basically the browser version of the "you critize society, yet you have a phone" meme.

> its competitors essentially exist only by virtue of being kept around by them

Just this competitor though...?

Apple and Microsoft certainly don't exist purely by virtue of being kept around by Google.

I mean, no, they don't. But Google pays $15B/year to be the default search engine. That's a hefty bill to keep Apple out of the search game.

they're not competitors. Apple leverages its equivalent position in the hardware/os space to not compete (also has the same search deal as Firefox to the tune of billions anyway), and Microsoft ships you a reskinned chrome with its OS.

Competitors was honestly a mistake on my part because you're right. Just this competitor as Firefox is the only independent competitor left with significant usershare at all.

Microsoft don't write a browser engine. Apple lets theirs stagnate, and IIRC make a lot of money from the iOS default search engine.

> Microsoft don't write a browser engine.

Well, they did, but they let it stagnate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com