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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

I just read that Google has paid 120B for the last decade to be the default search engine on Apple devices. If Apple changes the default to Bing then people will just change it back to Google in the settings.

What’s the thinking behind giving Apple a ton of free money so they can have more resources for marketing and R&D and become even stronger competition for Android? iPhone is gaining more and more market share every year. Seems like Google wants to save their search business by sacrificing Android.

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I think it makes more sense to view android as a cheap way to negotiate it down to only 120B from a lot more money over the last decade. Search ads for rich consumers are insanely profitable, more profitable to google than android has ever been.

You and I would change our search engine but most iPhone users need an apple-maps-level mess up to go switch from the defaults (and even then that’s stabilized to a majority apple share now). Bing+apple could have been an existential threat to them in the mobile era; without android they would’ve had to pay whatever apple wanted.

I wouldn't even change my search engine back. Google often sends me captchas while using a VPN, and sometimes somehow I end up stuck doing the captcha for 1+ min. So I've been using Bing for the last few weeks when that happens, and I haven't found the results worse than Google's.

> Google often sends me captchas while using a VPN.

Even Yandex.com has started to send me captchas. Once I encounter a captcha page I quickly switch over to bing or ddg. No time for the captcha bullshit.

Neither Brave Search nor DuckDuckGo do this and both have better results than Google at this point.

this was what caused me to stop using Google as my default search engine as well.

Have you tried DuckDuckGo?

I haven't, but I probably should. I just found it straightforward to type bing.com when blocked by Google and it was the first thing that came to mind.

And after seeing I wasn't blocked it has become my go-to in the last few weeks; I've ended up using it about 10 times in the last month.

I suspect that they know that the average user won't actually change it back. Just like how, IIRC, Apple Maps is (or at least was as a few years ago) the most commonly used mapping software purely due to the reach of iphone's userbase

Apple Maps is actually competitive with Google Maps and has walled garden integrations so it's not really comparable to me as Google Search versus Bing/DDG/whatever. Not to say the other search options are so terrible people would definitely switch, more that's definitely not the case with maps.

I actually think its better than Google Maps now. Seems like google is following apple maps new features (e.g. stop signs everywhere).

Well the thinking by google has surely been that Apple Search (iSearch?) would be competitive if Apple percieved it would be in their interest to build it / work with another partner. It's not impossible that someone else would build a good / better tool. Since all these tools also significantly improve with use and feedback, switching the default would probably have a massive impact

As of right now, Bing is also competitive with Google.

It didn’t start that way though. It took a lot of time and money; version 1 was terrible by most accounts.

That being said Apple is a company with enough cash and time to throw at Search. People also said that it would be hard to break Google’s dominance of maps.

I guess that's why Apple's being called to witness - Google also throws a significant amount of cash at Apple over search, and Apple has not developed a search engine.

It's not the point, but I significantly prefer the Apple Maps turn-by-turn UI, especially now that they have cycling directions, and I notice no real difference in the quality of directions for my use.

I originally switched to Apple Maps because Google Maps was a privacy nightmare, and the main thing I missed was "search along route". Apple Maps has something like it now, so I haven't missed Google Maps much. I also like that it buzzes my watch for upcoming turns, and can auto notify my wife when I'll navigate home (I'm sure Google has this too but I never noticed / used it on theirs before)

After Apple Maps being awful for years I’ve finally switched to it. The last straw is all the paid locations on Google Maps, it looks like a giant ad now.

Same. Started using Apple Maps years ago when I would occasionally hop on a Lyft ebike and have used it ever since

I prefer the lack of advertisements in Apple Maps.

That's nice but I hate everything besides the maps. I don't want to click on a photo and be redirected to the app store to download yelp. I don't want curated lists, or city guides. And there is no way to hide this trash. It's cluttering the only thing I care about, the maps!

Not only this, but a user who understands how to switch their default search to Google is likely not being fooled into clicking on search ads anyways.

"people will just change it back to Google in the settings"

My friend you do not know people.

People will state google has better search results than anything despite never having used anything else. People will go in and change it to Google but then again, anyone who wouldn't is probably the kind of person to use TikTok as a search engine (I have genuinely seen someone do this)

> People will state google has better search results than anything despite never having used anything else.

People will happily use the default search engine, no matter what it is, and believe that it's Google they're using, unless the search engine goes out of its way to tell the user that it's using something else.

People don't read error messages, people click away whatever gets in their way, people don't even notice logos.

I've always thought of these payments more as Google paying Apple to not build their own search engine.

They've kind of been building all the pieces over the years with spotlight integrations/etc...

This is definitely the correct take. Bing isn't the worry, it's Apple building something that users won't switch away from (see Apple Maps).

The agreement also prevents Apple from making its own search engine. I suspect if they did that and made it the default, lots of people wouldn't change it. Defaults are powerful.

That's their secret, Cap. Every other business unit in Google is a funnel back to the Advertising Money Printer Machine. Sure, if the business units make money, that's good to offset costs, but at the end of the day, if Google is paying $120B over 10 years to keep Google as the default search engine for Apple devices, they're making more than $120B over 10 years on Apple users.

Not to mention that Google can do first party ad injection on results to shift people towards Android, decreasing the cost per user for impressions and sucking more data out of them to again, fuel the ad machine.

I suspect that Google isn't paying Apple to have Google as the default engine, but it's to keep Apple from creating their own. Search is a huge business and Apple has a massive user share. They could cut into Google's search revenue if they made their own engine, and made it cleaner than Google.

The very existence of Bing is the counter argument to your point.

Bing has a roughly 8% desktop market share. PC has a 70% market share.

That means about 11.5% of windows computer didn’t switch away from Bing.

Assume a similar share on apple devices. Apple has two billion active devices.

Assume that is 1.5 billion people, round down market share to 10%: 150 million of the richest customers on earth. What is that worth to google?

Not to mention another competitor could buy the spots for less. If google leaves an opening someone would try to compete. Even Apple might.

So there’s future downside risk along with the risk to present profits.

Most people wouldn't switch back and Google knows that. That's why they pay good money for access.

In the search wars Google is the entrenched and slowly dying search engine with a lot of up and comers ready to lead the charge to better search.

> If Apple changes the default to Bing then people will just change it back to Google in the settings

This is the crux of the underlying legal theory that this case is exploring. If the above statement is true, then yes; Google has been just burning money, and "stupid waste" isn't an antitrust issue (though maybe their shareholders could file a lawsuit).

But the DOJ makes the case that Google doesn't see it that way, Apple doesn't see it that way, and users don't see it that way... That if Apple changed the default to Bing tomorrow, users are so under-informed about the way the web works that Microsoft and Google's search share would swing radically and immediately. There's meat on those bones; people (who aren't Extremely Online HN Users, like yours truly) seem to find the search engines interchangeable, which implies the default matters. A lot.

They are paying them not to develop a competitor search engine* and not to default include adblock, not to mess with cookies ect. That doesn't need to be in the agreement but it is obviously implied. "Would google still pay us $10 billion if we did X?" is enough to do it.

* or more accurately keep it in the development phase for almost a decade now.

> people will just change it back to Google in the settings

No they wouldn‘t. A lot of testing and (probably?) research has shown that a massive amount of regular normie users will never change any defaults of any kind. Many would probably not even notice what search engine they‘re using. Defaults are incredibly powerful. They would easily accept a marginally worse product.

I don’t think most people would go through the trouble of changing it. Tbh bing isn’t much worse than google nowadays.

As long as people find out which celebrity was in what movie or what restaurants are nearby, they wont care if it’s google or Bing that tells them.

It's far more likely that Apple launches their own search engine (which they're already working on) and displaces Google Search in the same way they displaced Google Maps.

a large number of people will just assume Apple now recommends Bing over Google for better search results, and leave it as Bing. in Apple we trust is the way a lot of Apple users operate

The irony here being that you’ve apparently been victim to “in Google we trust” and failed to notice that Bing and DDG are highly competitive with Google these days.

I’ve used DDG for years at this point and the number of times I’ve needed to drop back to Google has fallen to zero for the past few of them.

Sometimes I use the other searches just to see how different they are, and they are pretty good. There are less ads on DDg and brave which makes the experience at least a lot better.

I wouldn't be so sure of that....there are less filtered ways I encounter google's ad-laden results and that'd send me to Bing/Duck Duck Go poste-haste.

Apple is getting a 'crap free' google search results currently.

Google care about ads. Search has lots of, android dont.

Android is chock full of ads. Every. Single. App.

Every standard mainstream app maybe, but not every app. FDroid is the best source of finding ones without, but also in the normal play store you will find big ones without. But yes, google is in the ads buisness, otherwise there would be a easy option to search apps without ads.

Apple’s market share has been pretty flat for a decade.

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