Nadella tells a court that Bing is worse than Google – and Apple could fix it
theverge.com
theverge.com
Google did a magnificent job of making their search engine the default on the most popular devices and software at moment in time.
For whatever new niche of programming concepts I’m looking into, google generally outperforms Bing at finding relevant pages.
The most prominent feature for me is that it only shows 0 or maybe 2 search results when there really isn’t more to find. It’s freeing, honestly.
I used to verify it with a Google search like you, only to be confirmed every time. I haven’t been doing that for a while now :-)
>“Defaults are the only thing that matter,” he said, “in terms of changing user behavior.” He called the idea that it’s easy to switch “bogus.”
Maybe it's bogus on Windows, which doesn't respect search engine or browser choice, but it's one step to change the search engine on Apple's platforms which is what he's talking about here.
>Not only are the economics of the Google deal hugely favorable for Apple, he said, but Apple may also be afraid of what Google would do if it lost default status. Google has a number of hugely popular services, like Gmail and YouTube — what if Google used those apps to relentlessly promote downloading Chrome, thus teaching people to circumvent the Safari browser entirely?
Google already does this: click a link on any of their apps on iOS and it pulls up a menu asking to install Chrome or the Google app, your actual default browser being the last option. If Apple is afraid of Safari losing dominance to Chrome on iOS there's no way they'd allow this.
>The very fact that Bing has market share of any kind on Windows — which is somewhere in the teens, Nadella said, as opposed to “low, low single digits” on mobile — is proof that defaults do work.
Again this is not really a default like the default search engine on iOS, it's a situation where you have to wage an ongoing war on the OS as it constantly changes or ignores your preference. How much desktop market share would Bing have if Windows 10+ didn't open Edge and Bing for every unintentional start menu web search?
>When Mehta asked him to respond to the idea that users can easily switch search engines, he said that “my only argument against that is that users don’t switch.” His best example: Apple Maps, which started out disastrously bad but has still gained market share in the last decade because it’s preinstalled on every iPhone.
Speaking of the OS ignoring your preference, Apple Maps on iOS is another example of this. It's not like a default search engine that can be changed, it's the operating system maliciously tricking people who clearly want another service into using the one the OS maker wants.
>For Nadella, becoming Apple’s default search engine wouldn’t be about the money, at least not directly. “We needed to be less greedy and more competitive,” he explained. A sudden increase in distribution, he said, would give Bing an increase in what Nadella called “query flow,” which essentially just means more people would do more searches. More incoming searches means more data the Bing team can use to improve the search engine and more reasons for advertisers to come to the platform. An improved search engine gets used more, which means more data, and round and round it goes. This is the virtuous cycle of search engines, and Nadella believes Bing could use that cycle to quickly catch up to Google’s quality.
If the only way to make a search engine good enough to be #1 is to already be #1, as Satya seems to be implying, then it makes no sense to be in the search engine business.
Microsoft CEO testifies that Google’s power in search is ubiquitous - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37743931 - Oct 2023 (11 comments)