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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

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"In the US, iOS has no search engine choice at all, in europe DDG quietly pays Apple a fee to be one of the choices. Android is the only reason anyone outside of europe can use DDG on the phone at all."

Wait, what? Where does this information comes from? When I was in the USA I bought an iPhone and could choose DDG. Isn't it like that for all phones bought in the US? Did they somehow "knew" I was from Europe and showed me an extra option? It is the same for my relatives who live in South America and friends in Asia.

In fact CNET claims that the choice was added because of the USA's DOJ: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/in-ios-17-apple-adds-abilit...

Also, is it confirmed anyehere that DDG pays Apple, or is this just conjecture? The only thing I can find about this is DDG's CEO criticizing Google/Apple for exchanging money so Google is the default.

> Also, is it confirmed anyehere that DDG pays Apple, or is this just conjecture?

It came out during the trial, in Weinberg's testimony. They pay Apple a revenue share for all searches done via the Safari search integration if the search engine is set to DDG.

As far as I know, none of this was even conjectured before that testimony. That he is so happy paying a revshare to Apple is pretty surprising given how vehement DDG was about the original Android search engine choice screen in the EU.

>In the US, iOS has no search engine choice at all, in europe DDG quietly pays Apple a fee to be one of the choices.

I’m in the US and I chose DDG from the iOS default search engine list.

Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia are my choices.

Not sure why Amazon & Apple don’t have search engines of their own. Don’t they have this infra?

Amazon used to have a separate web search product, but they shuttered that effort a while ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com#A9.com_search_portal

Back in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060416033344/http://a9.com/-/h...

Since then, they've doubled down on product search for amazon.com.

Well, he was called in an antitrust trial against google, so what headline did you expect that doesn't contain the words DDG and Google?

He's been saying the same things, always focused on google and never apple, for a long time, and that's also why he was called in the first place.

Google is a competitor… Apple isn’t

What you are saying is false, and on top of that, you can install a 3rd party browser on iOS and choose whatever search engine you want.

> Android is the only reason anyone outside of europe can use DDG on the phone at all

Huh?

First, as dwighttk noted already, DDG is one of the search engines available in the search engine setting for iOS.

Second, even if it wasn't one of the options in the search engine settings you could simply manually visit duckduckgo.com in Safari, and then save that as a bookmark or favorite or to your home screen.

Third, DDG has an app on the Apple App Store.

None of what you've said eliminates the issue highlighted in the title

Are you able to use Kagi as a default search engine via the extension in the US?

Yes. But it's weird, it appears to work by redirecting from your default search engine's domain rather than becoming the real search engine.

What search engine does iOS use in the US?

Regardless, "the other guy is even worse" is a very poor defence. In fact, it's not a defence at all!

And since Google is obviously DDG's main competitor, it's not too strange they're mainly focused on Google/Android.

> What search engine does iOS use in the US?

I really love this idea of Apple as an innocent company that has been corrupted by Google. Maybe we can raise some money so that Apple doesn't have to prostitute itself to survive?

So I take it the answer is "Google"? Or...?

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