Google deal may have kept Apple from building search engine, exec says | Hacker News Reader

Google deal may have kept Apple from building search engine, exec says

arstechnica.com

25 pointspseudolus7 comments

> "If you know how to set your Wi-Fi, you know how to switch your search," Cue said.

I’m trying to put my finger on why this claim feels so disingenuous. I think it’s because it’s a skill you are forced to learn in order to use the service (WiFi). And that WiFi is such a fundamental base operating aspect of your phone and without WiFi your phone will just straight up not work in some circumstances, but with the default search engine it will of course work, just in a different way than if you changed the search engine. In other words, people have to learn how to work the settings -> WiFi part of the phone to get it to even operate. They don’t have to learn settings -> Safari to use the search engine. So it’s a straight up flat out lie for the vast majority of iPhone users.

I think it would be much more directly comparable if you had to select your default search engine in settings every time you wanted to use internet at a different location and not spend extra money (data) and without doing that you just wouldn’t have functioning search capabilities on your phone. Then I think it would be ok to make this equivalency and have it be even remotely accurate.

By the way, I’m not really commenting on the merits of the article or within larger, just wanted to point out how much of a load of crap this particular sentence is. Simply because it’s the same +- amount of clicks away in the UI does not make it an equivalent UX feature

I recently switched my default search engine to give Kagi a try. It was a lot less straightforward than I expected.

You can't add a new search engine anywhere in firefox settings; you have to go to the search website, then right click the URL, and the menu includes an option to add the search. Then you can go back to settings and set it as default.

I did as well (maybe from the same HN announcement you saw a few days ago). The problem with Kagi is that it’s not on the “approved list”. Had it been Bing or one of the other 4 providers that have special treatment it would have been much faster.

Of course, the fact that special treatment list exists and there’s no easy eject for providers not on that list is another problem

If Wi-Fi automatically worked the moment you took the phone out of the box then exactly nobody would know how to change it.

Here's a closer analogy – how many people can successfully go into their phones and change the cell network they are connected to?

Isn't that a bit obvious? We all know about the tens of billions paid every year to maintain position. Obviously this wasn't in case Apple would segue to Bing.

The business case of building a search engine from scratch which robs you of 20b in yearly profit is very low.

If I were hypothetically at Apple, I'd use the funding from Google paying to promote search in order to exclusively fund creating a new search engine.

Why do that, when if you did that you would be:

1. Turning down billions of dollars in revenue, while for Apple this is not exactly something that makes or breaks their business it’s not exactly just a tiny little line item either

2. Inviting a door to your own monopoly/anticompetitive arguments against you, when you already have enough of that problem in other spaces

3. Having 1 and 2 be true, AND also spending the resources to build your own engine, which as time and companies like DDG have proven demonstrate that one does not simply build a good search engine with little effort

It’s clearly an arrangement that’s beneficial to both of the parties to the detriment of others

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