Google paid $26.3B in 2021 to be the default search engine
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Google's plan to stop Apple from getting serious about search - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023874 - Oct 2023 (269 comments)
Most users will probably switch to Google anyway, at least in the short term. Google will probably lose some market share. This means less revenue. However, the "cost of revenue" is lower as well. So it may just be a wash. When tobacco companies were banned from advertising, their big expense of advertising went down as well - and so profit rose. Google's long-term outlook looks murkier. It really is possible for new entrants to come in and steal market-share if they didn't have to pay for default-privilege. Platforms could encourage specialized search engines as well - pick one for shopping, another for maps, another for reviews - maybe we'll get a Cambrian explosion?
But the fact that no ad-support search engine has been able to beat Google all these years, even Microsoft-supported Bing - means that internet search is fundamentally a hard problem to solve. It's also relatively capital intensive - all the hardware to crawl and index the web, human SERP raters and content moderators.
As the internet becomes more and more hyper-commercialized, the value of a general purpose search-engine may decline. Why search when there's mostly garbage out there. Try going to any news website.
Before Chrome existed it was pretty common for people to suggest downloading FF out of hand. So the habit has existed for years, on top of the ad campaigns that Google runs for chrome.
No other player has the ad revenue and market power to even attempt competing with Google:
* Microsoft's search ads + LinkedIn revenue was only $18.7b [3] in 2021 (9% of Googles) and they are the only big global (i.e. not Chinese) player with ad revenues over $10b and a competing search engine.
* Meta is the only company that comes closer in terms of ad revenue at $112b in 2021 (53% of Google) [4], but it's hard to imagine how they would fit search into their ecosystem.
* Apple has the resources and controls the valuable (=mostly iOS users) Safari market, but even for them, they would have to forego $18b/year (as per the article) in pure profits from their deal with Google and manage to actually create a competing product and advertise it heavily, which would costs them 10s of billions a year more. It makes sense that they'd rather keep taking the cash instead.
This also makes you realize just how valuable dominating the browser market with Google Chrome and having significant influence on the mobile market with Android must be for Google (and also why Apple doesn't allow third party browser engines on their platform).
[0] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-... [3] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-adverti...
And manipulate the AdWords auction market that they control.
They changed their rules a couple years ago to make it pretty much consistent with Apple's policies, but I think some of the bigger players got exceptions.
New wake lock api works in safari but when it is added to home screen. Then it fails silently…
Webkit team said that they fixed it 6months ago but Safari team does not accept fix.
Edit: Apparently 840 million Chinese use search engines[0] and at least 70% use Baidu[1] which would be 588 million so something like 12% out of those 4.9 billion people. Not sure why the stats aren't reflecting the Chinese population when they claim to be global.
[0] https://www.statista.com/topics/1337/search-engines-in-china...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/253340/market-share-of-s...
I guess however statcounter is getting their data is heavily biased toward the west.
I sadly just switched back to chrome after 3 years using fire fox.
I use multiple profiles everyday but this isn't enough to make me switch away from Firefox.
Like the one that automatically applies dark mode to websites (even those that do not normally support it, like Hacker News) if the phone is in dark mode. Or the one that stops videos from playing by themselves. Or, I hate to admit, AdBlock.
This is my primary use case and I'm not ashamed of it :)
You can argue "defaults can be changed", sure. However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't. The activation energy just isn't there for users to switch defaults, and they likely don't even know they can. Rarely are defaults left because they're just so darn good.
I'd prefer things like this have a pop up during set up with a randomly ordered set of choices. To get on that list of choices might have a token fee (small sums of money are effective at weeding out garbage) required.
I don't know that it's a good solution to legislate every little thing including positioning in a UI, but I do think we need to be much, much more aggressive than we are now at stopping monopolies and breaking up these megacorps.
What kind of tires come on your Ford truck?
If Ford chooses the "default" tires you get on your F-150... is that anti-competitive, for all other tire manufacturers?
Must Ford give you the option which tires you want on your new F-150? Must they do it in a way that doesn't start with a "default"?
Or is the problem not that Ford picks a tire manufacturer, but that the tire manufacturer cannot in your mind share the profits back with Ford?
Makes it impossible for smaller incumbents to compete
* Dedicated Netflix button on TV remotes (you can't even change this)
* SiriusXM bundled (with free trial) with car stereos
They're not paying Ford for putting a Michelin tire on the vehicle, but they are likely getting an above "volume order" discount.
Similar to Search engines, how often do you hear about people changing the brand of tire on their vehicle? How often is it just "I bought another of what I already had"?
Disclaimer: Former Googler, though in Cloud.
Tires are safety-critical equipment with a minimum bar of performance and externally imposed regulations on them that they function at an acceptable level. This makes them a mostly fungible commodity. Search engines are not, and as Google shows, have no minimum bar of performance that a reasonable person can expect.
Also you buy tires once, and then beyond wear and tear they don’t just randomly degrade one day. With search engines you are continuously subject to the daily whims of Google beancounters.
I don't think I'd entertain putting them at the same level and so the analogy falls apart.
my opinion is that if the product is vastly superior it would gain market share no matter what (we have countless examples for this). but if the new product is just a minor improvement or a minor change over the default choice, then yes, defaults would matter in that case.
> I can conceive of a smaller but better product which just doesn't have the war chest to pay for positioning. That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user. That pretty clearly has the potential to harm consumers.
I don't know how you write this law.
- Are you compelling OS makers to present arbitrary options for various types of application? For search only? If so, why? If not, where does it end? How do you weigh this against free speech concerns in the relevant jurisdictions?
- Why would it only apply to search providers and operating systems? Paying for positioning happens in many, many places. Would we not also need to outlaw sponsorships and exclusivity deals such as "$BRAND_NAME - the official beer of $SPORTS_ARENA"? You can't bring outside beverages in, so you're limited to "the default".
So you're not proposing getting rid of something (which sounds so nice and simple!), you're proposing creating new restrictions on what businesses can do. Those restrictions have to be defined in a clear, unambiguous way to avoid challenges in court.
I'm saying there's probably no version of your hypothetical law that would stand up in court (not to mention pass a legislature).
To your point of consumer harm, businesses have rights (varying by the law of the land) that must be balanced against consumer rights.
A business should always be subservient to the general citizens who will make up said business. Following that, consumer rights (citizen rights) should always be promoted over the rights of a business. So I don't know that I take your point about balancing those two things. They seem like separate classes of rights with one that is more important. I guess that's technically still balancing, but in a way that business always loses.
As to writing a law to stand up to scrutiny. I don't know that I have to care about that. That's not my problem to deal with, that's our legislators problem. In fact that should be one of their primary problems, writing laws that stand up to scrutiny that protect abuse of general citizens.
It seems more like a lack of will, which I could speculate on.
Edit: I'll say this, as something reflecting my actual opinion. I tend to agree that this has a high degree of complexity and applying a flippant indiscriminate legislation to ban this won't work and won't stand up to legal scrutiny, though I get the sense you know a lot more about why than I do. That said, I do think we can do better, and if you work backwards from an impossibly high ideal, with a lot of time and effort someone can land on a solution that's better than nothing. I don't think that's impossible. I don't think legislation is necessarily the right way to go about it. I was hesitant to add that part to my initial post but went with it anyway. It isn't aligned entirely with my own beliefs about competition, even though I think the practice of pay for play is kind of gross, and imbalanced and doesn't reflect a superior product.
It's never simple. It's really hard (/impossible) to come up with good legislation. Much of it creates weird incentives or high costs to enforce or high costs to doing business which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and citizens in the form of lower dividend checks in retirement.
Saying "it's not my problem" amounts to "i have no idea how to solve this".
I expect my representatives who I do vote for to know answers like this though and that's not unreasonable, its one of the basis of our current system in fact.
That doesn't terrify me, it makes me question why have them then? I don't need a paper pusher with a loud voice, I want leaders who can solve problems their constituents think are important and take on responsibility of figuring these things out.
If you gave me time to devote to it, a staff, authority, and the right bipartisanship climate I could figure it out.
I don't have an answer, because I spent less than an hour thinking about this problem, and most of that hour was spent starting to understand the nuances involved from a half assed answer I threw out into the void because I could and I was curious to see what people would say, not because I couldn't arrive at an actual solution given the time and resources. I remain convinced this problem is tractable even if its not through legislative means.
I'm not invested in this problem enough to take action though, I'd rather go back to working on my side projects. I am however, invested enough to spend an hour shooting the shit on a message board.
Nowadays you still have the problem in some sense due to trust in voting systems, but theoretically you could run many of the functions of congress via calling a vote to the general population and they could do it on their smart phone or something. Auth would be hard(ish) from a practical perspective. Knowing enough about a topic could be easily resolved via allowing voters to appoint a proxy on certain bills or writ large.
It's easy to fall into a trap where "business" === "huge rich company", but it's just not that simple.
You say it's a lack of will, but I really don't buy that most people hold your position that anything resembling an exclusive arrangement like we've been talking about should be illegal. Personally I absolutely don't support that sort of blanket rule.
For some reason, the other search engines are not really better. Microsoft probably spent millions on Bing and it’s not fantastic. (I haven’t tried Kagi yet).
Good grief. At the end of the day some orders will be arbitrary.
Paying to be default is competing.
It may be leveraging or protecting a monopoly when you already have one, but otherwise its just a mechanism of competition. (Like most mechanisms of conpetition, it favors those who already have an advantage—especially the particular advantage of a bigger pool of money to spend on it—which is essentially why we have rules conditioned on existing market power in the first place.)
For the record, if I were running a successful business I'd be paying for whatever I thought expanded the success of my company. I'm pragmatic above most other things, and play the game as it stands. That doesn't mean I can't hold on to extreme ideals at the same time. There is acknowledging reality isn't as you want it to be and working with that and then there's ignoring the reality in front of you. That latter one leads to ruin.
Should all of those arrangements be illegal also?
> However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't.
Internet Explorer was the default.
It still is if you consider Edge to be in the lineage.
Google Chrome is not the default browser on windows, isn’t even installed yet commands > 60% market share worldwide across all platforms, likely higher on windows.
Google Maps on iPhone has reportedly 70% market share, doesn’t come even installed.
This is not to say buying defaults is a good thing, but the premise that being default automatically commands usage and people don’t switch from default would be incorrect in these glaring examples.
On mobile edge doesn't show up in top 5, and is .6% on tablets.
Maps because by the time Chrome has pressured you into logging into your Google Account(TM), you've already drank the Kool-Aid (and/or they're pushing it via Google search rich results).
Also what happens to Firefox if they can only charge a nominal fee for search engines priority? That is 90% of their revenue.
The way to beat google's search dominance is to build a better search engine. Bing could beat them today if "Browse by bing" didn't take 30+ seconds to get you results. It is vastly superior at finding answers than google search.
If that is true then why is Google spending $25 billion with a B per year? Do they like wasting money? Why isn't there a shareholder lawsuit?
The real answer is that they want to kill a chance to build competitors or for them to grow. No?
I stand by the fact I think this is anti competitive, its the big guy throwing weight around to prevent any little guys from emerging. I think that actively harms innovation, and by extension the consumer.
I know that's how things are and will likely continue to be. On the flip side I don't think it's entirely fair to say "Wow you did so well, but now we have to tie your hands as you're ripped to shreds by the hounds." Success should earn you some type of advantage, but I don't think first past the post should get you permanent immunity. Or if the market is so hard to compete in that it is infeasible for someone else, such that its a natural monopoly we have words for enterprises like that: Utility.
Complicated problem for sure.
1. This is comparing desktops/laptops to phones. Way more people have phones than computers, and most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default.
2. This is comparing a browser to a search engine. More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine.
Obviously this is speculation, but it seems like pretty reasonable speculation, particularly the first point.
No mobile search has launched anything nearly as comprehensive, probably because it would cost so much.
Chromium Edge and Chrome have pretty much identical UI/UX. If you switch between Google and Bing, you will immediately notice the difference.
>most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default.
"80.12% of iOS users, used Safari as their default browser as of 2020." Source: https://zipdo.co/statistics/apple-safari/
About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood.
Again, I'd argue that this may not be true for a lot of people. And even if they notice the difference, I'm not sure that a) they'd care, or b) they'd know how to do anything about it.
My wife/mom would probably ask me how to change their browser back, if the UX is different enough that they couldn't find their way around (but if not, then they won't care about that either).
But they're not going to care to change the default browser back, as the UX difference between the two has a much smaller gap. Only the results are different, if they may not even notice that.
> About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood.
But this means that 80% users stick to the default (in this specific case). If these are users that don't care or don't know how to change the default, then the defaults matter more than the OP (and the linked article) suggest. And 80% is a much bigger deal than 20%.
I'm not quite sure how - but I'm pretty certain my grandmother uses the web exclusively through her phones stock email client. I've tried to show her... but I always find her inside some webview spawned by the email app eventually.
The power of the defaults is not overrated. This is just an excellent example of an "exception."
In the case of Google, they already have decades of conditioning with people viewing it as the main or only search engine worth anything. When you need to look up something, most people would tell you to "google it." The power of the defaults benefits google.com much better than it benefits Microsoft with browsers.
And that's simply because the delta between Google and the competition in search is greater than the delta between Microsoft and its competition in browsers
Granted, the power of the defaults is usually strongest in the context of random settings in a product that end users don't know anything about. Search engines are something most people know at least something about by now.
btw: Kagi is perfect!
It's an American antitrust action. The predominant recipient of Google's largesse, Apple, is an American company whose products are the predominant devices in America.
Given all that, it's notable that Google is spending what is essentially a lower bound on Kagi's domestic TAM on keeping the likes of them down.
You don't pay advertisers with Google. Advertisers pay Google. Google is incentivized to give you useful results so that you continue coming back and using them for search. If they gave poor results people would stop bothering to use their search and they would get less ad impressions. By paying a flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time.
Google is incentivized to improve the system for both advertisers and users.
This is only true if they are not exploiting an unfair market position.
Aren’t we seeing evidence of this incentive structure spinning in the opposite direction at Google? Shitty results mean more searches leading to more ad impressions.
Of course you do. That’s the whole point of ads. Where do you think the money comes from?
Ads manipulate you in order to spend more on the advertised products. The consumer ends up paying for them.
When people say that Bing or DDG is good enough to use instead of Google, it is obvious to me that they are only searching in English. Kagi was the first search engine that could compete.
For example, looking for local stores and businesses: usually, they just don't come up at all. I had forgotten how I used to have to tack the city I am in on to each query back in the day with Google.
Even then though, the lack of reviews, mapping, etc. makes it almost useless for what I really need.
I'd love to see Kagi improve in this area, and I'd happily pay again.
On a side note, Yelp is an awful platform. They show recommended/similar locations down your throat so hard on mobile that it's hard to learn about the actual location you're looking at.
I use Kagi for local too, as Google hijack the top 10 results for other crap that I don’t want and am not interested in.
It’s taken me a long time to start using the top hit in Kagi, as google has trained me to ignore top hits.
So it would cost closer to "only" $13.7bn/year for every American using Google to switch to Kagi.
And Google generated $76 billion in US ad revenue from those users in 2023 [2], just goes to show how "cheap" Kagi really is compared to being monetized by ads.
[1] https://www.statista.com/topics/1001/google/
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-...
Kagi doesnt have 25-year emails, and it costs $60 per year per user at Google’s.
> Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
I would never have guessed it really means “every human eyeball will be assimilated and adapted to fuel our ad empire”
Google's Search is still the best, though. And I don't have any numbers, but I could bet that it's by far the most used search engine even on browsers that don't have it as a default (e.g., Vivaldi).
Apple has a walled garden. Isn't this Google paying to have their product billboard inside the wall? Why are we blaming Google for this?
I remember the first years of chrome, people were using IE regardless of the fact that chrome was a superior browser.
In general, I would prefer no default and the choice of the search engine be done by the user on the first access but, from the point of view of google, i think it's the best way for them to spend those moneys.
I wish Apple would switch the default to Kagi, if they are as serious about privacy as they claim they will.
Browser?
But to most of the rest of the population, they think "I got out my phone, I typed 'best headphones 2023' and bought the best one I could afford".
Notice how they neither know nor care which browser they used, which search engine, which protocol, which website, etc. Those things are all irrelevant to what they were trying to do.
It's our job as engineers to make sure everything just works and those people don't need to know or care.
But if you came up with some wearable tech that allowed people to conduct searches (and see Google's search ads), then Google would likely want to pay you to make their search the default instead of making a partnership with Bing or rolling your own search.
If the hypothesis that Google is not better or indistinguishable from other search engines is true, then you'll be fine (or perhaps even better). But if it's not, then your whole business will have a drag force from that arbitrary friction (perhaps overcomable if the other parts of the business are great).
If you rise up with Google as the default search and then threaten to switch away when you are big, then your threat won't have teeth because you risk too much inherently by potentially disrupting the experience of your customer base.
At this point I'd like to see Apple get into search, but if that also gets them knee-deep into advertisement then I worry about them becoming just another Google.
How so exactly?
Not huge, but not nothing
The also display list articles separately from other sites, which is very refreshing
I view this as a feature, as I find my mental health improves the less I am tuned in to current events that are not explicitly relevant to my job or hobbies.
I would say 7 of the top 10 are just Pinterest, but it’s really 7 of the top 7. Yeesh.
Perhaps, some websites would stop being so hostile if they were considered as such and blocked by a higher percentage of users :)