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Comment by smeeth | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Grok that much, but there's nothing particularly new or interesting about this deal. Telegram has a big international audience, it makes sense someone would pay to be the default for user adoption reasons.

"Feels oh so telling that Google has to pay Apple and not the other way around. If Google search was so great wouldn't we all be clamoring for it to be the default search in Safari?"

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The Google Search deal seems like a much more defensible business decision to me for a couple reasons. For starters Google gets revenue almost every single time that search integration is used so there is a direct return on the investment. What's the conversion rate for a paid Grok account? It might turn out to be terribly low and $300M is a substantial amount of money. I doubt a normal company without Elon's vast wealth network that needs to actually make money would gamble on a deal like this.

The other reason is that the Apple deal is a big part of maintaining Google's search monopoly. Owning a tech monopoly is vastly more valuable than competing in a crowded market so locking down market share to achieve that can be worth spending more per user than their median value. Grok isn't even in the ballpark of an LLM monopoly so those benefits don't apply in their case.

people go out of their way to install chrome but don't go out of their way to change away from Bing search as much, su that seems correct to me.

Google does it to hinder competition, so it is telling.

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