I know I’m nitpicking, but this just doesn’t add up:
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
What? Worldwide, iOS market share is peanuts compared to Android. Depending on the report, the exact amount varies pretty widely, but nothing ever seems to report more than 18-ish percent worldwide. macOS is negligible. Meanwhile, Android’s market share is enormous.
Android devices alone—worldwide—could easily account for half of Google’s search traffic, especially when you consider countries like India. But the DOJ wants to argue that:
1. Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2. Half of Google’s traffic comes from Apple devices
If we believe that 92% figure, that places a generous upper limit of Google’s search traffic originating from Apple devices at about 20%, far short of “nearly half.”
Look, I hate the monopolistic nature of search just as much as the next person, but can we please double-check that our numbers actually make sense?
I’m really confused by what I’m reading on this page. Can someone clarify the different between these two?
Quoting:
> Apple iOS continues to hold its large share of the smartphone operating systems’ market within the United States, claiming more than half of the market in May 2020.
> ...
> Android still the one to catch
> Android, however, still holds the largest share of the United States smartphone operating systems’ market and has done for many year.
So this is about the smartphone operating systems, in the united states. Apple has “more than half of the market”, and Android has “the largest share”. How are both statements possibly true?
>> claiming more than half of the market in May 2020.
Market share /= number of devices.
Apple owns the "market", ie the money. Apple owners spend vastly more on their OS (via playstore). Android might be running on vastly more devices, but the people who matter, the rich people with money to spend on camera apps, spend that money via iPhones.
We live in a world where whales matter more than customers. The legions of android users who use their phones to make phonecalls, as internet browsers, and as navigational tools ... they don't matter as much as any single iPhone user who regularly drops a few hundred every month on eye candy iPhone backgrounds.
I see what you mean here, and it might be what the statistics website is claiming. However, it is not clear at all. They use the words "large share of the smartphone operating systems’ market within the United States," and "largest share of the United States smartphone operating systems’ market" when talking about the market share for Apple and for Android, respectively. Sounds like the same metric is being compared.
I don’t think it’s that stark. iPhone has captured the market of people who want to pay for things related to their smartphone by offering a slightly higher end smartphone.
Android users made a choice to prioritize their smartphone less in their financial lives by getting a cheaper device (except for the 5-6 HN commenters who got an Android because of a personal vendetta against the Apple App Store policies).
It stands to reason that the people who decided not to spend money on a smartphone also decide not to spend money on smartphone apps.
Sorry to burst your bubble of pretention but the highest end android phones are in another league of price and have been for a long time.
To be fair I won't even bother comparing the Zflip2 foldable because it's more of a proof of concept than something many people buy but it's price tag would make you blush. So, the numbers: the latest and greatest iPhone 12 max is $1549 CAD while Samsung's Note 20 Ultra 512GB is $2029.99 CAD.
I disagree about iPhone's being inferior to android phones.
While I don't doubt that high (build) quality android phones exist none of the ones I have personally owned qualified (Sony Ericsson, Sony, Samsung). My current iPhone has lasted more than double as long as any of those did before falling apart.
“In the United States, Apple iOS devices — those running on Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system account for roughly 60 percent of mobile-device usage. Apple’s
is a closed ecosystem; Apple does not license iOS to third-party mobile device manufacturers.
Another roughly 40 percent of mobile-device usage comes from devices that use Android, an open-source mobile operating system controlled by Google. Unlike iOS, Android is licensable, which means third-party mobile device manufacturers can use it as the operating system for their devices. All other mobile operating systems, combined account for less than one percent of mobile device usage in the United States.”
(Of course, whether that’s correct is a different question from whether that’s what the DoJ claims, but it doesn’t seem farfetched to me that it is correct, too)
No. That's NOT what the DOJ wants to argue. Yes, the complaint itself does refer to market share, but it doesn't specifically refer to "92 percent of the world's internet searches". In fact, the complaint refers to market share within the United States, since that's geographically relevant to the case. What happens elsewhere isn't. [1]
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
92 percent links to a report by statcounter.com [2]. That's the NYTimes making a claim about Google's market share and linking to a source.
If you read the sentence even more carefully, you'll see the word "which" appear twice. "Which" grammatically denotes a non-defining clause from the perspective of the writer. It's information that you could remove without altering the core of the sentence: [3]
"The Justice Department argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google the center of consumers’ online lives"
More importantly, "which" is gramatically used from the perspective of the writer to give a bit of non-essential background to the sentence. And so, what is absolutely NOT being said here, is that the DOJ claims that Google holds a 92 percent market share.
>Over the years, Google has steadily increased its dominant position in general
search services. In July 2007, Google estimated its general search services market share at
68 percent. By June 2013, Google estimated that its share in the United States had already
increased to 77 percent on computers. By April 2018, Google estimated that its share was
79 percent on computers and 93.5 percent on mobile. More recently, Google has accounted for
almost 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent
of queries on mobile devices. Recent share estimates are in Figures 7 and 8.
The NYT constantly embellishes like this, it's a really shitty part of its style. If you want to add information, don't infix it within a description of the Justice Department's argument. At least put the editorial in a different paragraph, if not the editorial section.
Pretty sure the "over half" figure refers to traffic in the US, where iOS is around half of mobile devices, unlike the global market where Android has a definite monopoly outside the US.
The DOJ legislates largely based on US figures, but noting Google's global power is hard to ignore completely.
They said “worldwide” for the other figure and failed to specify the region [in the article] for the other. I think you’re right, but it’s still deceptive, and I’m inclined to believe it was deliberate. Even though the DOJ does seem to clarify in the actual filing, it rubs me the wrong way, and the article summarizing the events is misleading.
If this is what they meant, then the usefulness of the statement is even more questionable. If more than half of mobile devices are iOS, then your prior expectation would be that more than half of traffic would come from those devices.
Android devices are so cheap that I have many of them, some dedicated to a single purpose (I have an Android “phone” [without service] and a FireHD that are used only for reading data from my cars’ OBD2 ports and another running my sprinkler system interface)
IOS devices are more expensive, so the ones I have actually get used (and most were bought secondhand so don’t contribute to market sales figures). Our household usage and search share is surely 99+% from Apple OSes, while the device share of devices bought new at retail might be only 40% Apple.
The justice department doesn't care who handles search traffic in Cambodia, Canada, or Taiwan. They are only interested in US based search traffic where iOS has 50%+ market share.
> preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple,
Be careful what you ask for. If you make such deals illegal, Apple will have to set Google as search engine for FREE thus benefiting Google.
As a non-murican it baffles me that US government will try to hurt its own successful companies in this fashion which smells of incompetence and political vendetta rather than genuine concern for the health of search ecosystem.
Presumably it would only be Google prevented from entering into such agreements, since nobody else has a dominant market position in search.
The interesting question then would be whether Apple would take somebody else's money and change the default search engine on their devices. Which might net them almost as much money, but might also irritate a lot of their users if the highest bidder isn't as good of a search engine.
Companies like Google are starting to have way too much influence on government. Government does not like it at all so they'll take measures to curb the influence one or the other way.
They do, and also it makes a better case than worldwide where Google is kneecapped by the Chinese government to benefit Bandung, or Russia where Yandex is a strong competitor.
And are a way, way more attractive demographic for advertisers. I knew about the deal, but until the House report I didn’t realize it made up such a high proportion of Apple’s profits (14 to 21%). Knowing Apple, they must be driving a hard bargain.
I have no knowledge of any of this but the report doesn't either. It states those are estimated numbers culled from the web. AFAIK there is no actual public info on what the dollar amount is (and I certainly don't know what it is).
I do see everyone running with those numbers as if they were fact though. That's the danger of using such made up numbers in the report: everyone else repeats them as if they were fact even when the report says they don't know.
Yeah. Go to Walmart and look at the cellphones in green boxes that get sold for non-contract usage. They are all Android and most will be used for messages and calls. They are absolutely horrific to use for web browsing. Maybe in a couple of generations that will change.
Yes, why try to justify such an obviously incorrect statement? It's clear that the only reasonable explanation is that it is US traffic only where iOS indeed has over 50% market share.
iOS really dominates — I’d guess that half of the Android users get pushed by a salesman at a carrier store, who get spiffed by different companies. Many only buy a smartphone because they are unaware flip phones still exist!
The irony of the suit will be when Google is barred from paying for preferential treatment, then everyone chooses them as the default anyway, saving Google billions of dollars per year while leaving their 95% market share untouched.
Who had Apple down on their betting sheet as the biggest loser from a Google anti-trust lawsuit?
Apple won't be the biggest loser; Mozilla will be.
If Google is compelled to stop making search deals, Mozilla loses 90% of their income. They just laid off tons of staff. How many more will they be forced to cut?
Apple I suspect will be just fine. But this isn't good news at all on the browser monoculture front.
It would be an absurd conclusion to reach that Google can't pay Mozilla to feature their search, but can sink billions into Chrome to gain market share.... and feature their search. I don't see a sensible end state though. What do you do? Spin off Chrome, destroy it as a business by preventing it from doing a deal with Google to feature Google search... and then what? Act surprised when web browser development stops dead?
Wouldn't they just try to get Microsoft to pay instead? I doubt Mozilla cares which search engine they're getting paid to make default as long as they're getting money somehow. And MS hasn't given up on trying to push Bing on people, so I could see them going for a deal like that.
It's certainly possible. I suspect if Google drops out though, then the price for Bing being included would go way down. They'd have no big players to bid against. I don't see Yandex or Baidu being interested.
It's also possible Microsoft would exercise caution, considering this suit against Google. They may want to sidestep any deals that could paint a target on their back in the future.
Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? 12 billion might just be the cost of keeping them out of the search market.
It's not 2000 anymore. Building a web scale search engine no longer requires novel distributed systems work, and the most viable search algorithms have strong open source implementations. It's still a very hard problem to get right, but you can create an "interesting" poc in a few weeks. Recent work on unspervised content based recommenders can help reduce click stream data requirements.
Are Bing and DDG using those algorithms? Because every 6-8 months I give one of them a try and they are horrible. First I force myself a week of no falling back to Google when I cannot find anything and then slowly I just give up again. Did they misunderstand something elementary?
I've used DDG search exclusively for about 9 months now, and I've never used the !g flag. Comments like this completely baffle me.
In my anecdotal experience, it's every bit as good as google, and I simply did not notice a difference in the results when I switched.
It must be down to what people search for, or maybe how heavily Google has customized their personal results to fit their behaviors. I mostly use web searches for looking up technical documentation, and 5-second tasks like weather forecasts and unit conversions.
I've used DDG for over a year now almost exclusively and while I agree it isn't by any definition horrible, sometimes when I know enough key descriptors for something I'm searching for but continually fail to find it on DDG, I fall back to Google with the same query and find what I'm looking for.
This has happened probably a handful of times but enough times that I would have been stuck in the water without Google, unfortunately. Only one of those handful of cases was significant (I needed that information for work, not a simple curious search) but Google saved the day.
Some of it may be due to years of growing accustomed to building searches subconsciously around Google which is unfair to DDG, but it's hard to say definitively.
There are at least three types of searches where Google is still the 'king' over Bing.
1. Index size - Google spider visits more places than Bing spider. This is why Google delivers better results for compiler error strings, serial numbers etc.
Query examples where Bing/DDG completely miss the mark:
SA1DP2CF - a serial number
s2 034 253 033 C - audi rs2 exhaust manifold part no
Denninger Str. 96, 81925 München, Germany - what is on this location?
2. Intent/Semantic
Query examples:
tesla 00001 - who owns first tesla? Bing is completely lost
original elite alien name - looking for thargoids, Google tells me that right away, DDG #8
3. Localized
Query example:
hiking trails - Google gives me relevant local results based on my location (IP based), DDG doesn't (although it is aware of my IP-based location in the same way)
Getting these right is incredibly hard as you literally need Google size infrastructure to get this right, which even Bing doesn't have.
Second thing that is hard to catch up for any Google competitor is the rest of Google infrastructure users rely on - Browser, Email, Meet, Docs, Youtube, Android, Drive... Even if you get the search right but the user has to go back to Google for the rest of services, Google has a chance to get the user back.
IMO attacking Google starts with developing a product that does not insult user's intelligence, is innovative and does things Google can't, explores different business models (as ads inevitably lead to conflict of interest - optimize for user experience or advertising revenue?) and offers infrastructure that displaces (at least some) Google services.
Here's a search with big differences between DDG and Google:
"kicad convert wxpoint to millimeters"
Note how many "Autocad" entries clutter the DDG results. Google gets kicad in every single entry on the first page.
My biggest frustration with search engines is "I gave you the terms so USE THEM. Don't be helpful and omit terms you think aren't relevant."
I still miss AltaVista's interactive cluster diagrams where you could see the web of links and pick the relevant one.
If DDG simply implemented that single feature, I would never go back to Google.
The problem is that, like Microsoft in the 90's, Google will simply copy your feature if it takes off. So, there is no point in innovating in a visible way in search. That's the problem with a monopoly.
Yes, Google is the source for organic web page results (similar to how DDG uses Bing). There are currently about 60 other sources for the vertical specific results.
In my experience, it depends on what you are looking.
If you are searching technical info like pdf manuals, datasheets, etc.. I find DDG works better than Google, because most companies aren’t buying to be first result, so the manuals show up first.
If you are looking for Stack Overflow type of content “how to config X on linux using Y”. The !g flag becomes handy.
I would be unsurprised if it's true. The reality that DDG is going to have is that search is almost inherently personal, as an artifact of the imprecision of language and the lack of surrounding context. It applies to some searches more than others, but something like "what is vanilla?" Has a whole variety of answers. What is the substance vanilla? What is made out of vanilla? There's probably 80 different software frameworks that use vanilla in the name. Who knows how many companies have vanilla in their name. Oh, or it could be that you mistyped Manilla, which has its own set of results.
Personalization let's you cut down on that. Maybe this person searches for Python stuff a lot, so there's a good chance the frameworks are what they're looking for. Or, the inverse, this person looks up recipes all the time, they probably know what vanilla is so don't show a full page of "this is where vanilla comes from" results.
Lacking that context, they have to assume the same context for everyone, so either everybody gets a full page of web frameworks or everyone gets a full page of frameworks; DDG has no way to tell which you're probably more interested in.
DDG was mediocre for awhile then was amazing for a year or so in late 2018-mid 2019. Then as adoption grew and SEO teams saw more and more traffic through DDG, the results for non-SEO'd sites dropped dramatically. Still better than google in principle, but no longer in practice. I probably g!'d 10 times in that golden age, now I end up searching with google every day.
> Bing and DDG don't fall prey to being inundated by SEO blog spam like Google does.
Yeah, if you aren't used enough, it's not worth trying to target you for manipulation. All that really demonstrates is (1) they use different algorithms than Google, so optimizing against Google's algorithm doesn't work on them, and (2) they aren't used enough to be worth gaming separately.
Yeah my experience once I switched from Google to bing and ddg is that for everyday items search is much better because it's not inundated with blog spam. I only go back to Google when doing technical/code searches as it still seems to be a bit better on those.
One reason monopolies are considered bad is because they set the barriers to entry too high for competitors. I hear the “but Google is just better” argument a lot and sure they are. Google search is better because they pay other companies to hamstring Google’s competitors. That’s the whole point of this anti-trust investigation. Google has made themselves the best not necessarily by actually being the best, but by paying other companies to hold Google’s competitors down. They pay to make sure their competitors are worse, not that they are better.
You and me, as consumers, shouldn’t be forced to use a worse product just to try to balance the market, because we can’t compete with Google either. That’s the point of anti-trust regulations.
I've read this type of comment a few times on HN and always find it interesting. I've been using Bing for probably 10 years on desktop and Google on my phone (because Android). Generally I've found that I prefer the Bing results to the Google results more often than Bing. I've honestly had the opposite experience (frustrated with Google results, so I switch to Bing) so I wonder how much of it is based on subconscious assumptions about which we assume is better?
I'm sure there's some site the obfuscates results and could probably answer the question a little more scientifically.
I think given a given search algorithm there is an art to searching effectively with that algorithm. For example for a long time you’d search based on the words you expect in an answer to the question. As Google got more into the “reading the search query as a question” mode you had to shift a bit to framing the query with words from a question that would typically be asked to get the search results. I suspect some of the friction between switching search providers is that we unconsciously get tuned to what terms to use to get the answers we want.
DDG really isn’t horrible anymore. It’s weaker than Google in some areas, stronger in others. I stopped reflexively adding `!g` to my searches some time ago.
Yes, local searches (if that’s what you mean) would be one of its weak points.
On the other hand, there are often various good local search providers who have bangs that you can use directly, with better SERPs than Google for the relevant queries.
Turn off all the data collection in Google and personalization from it and compare the results. They go down in quality considerably in my experience.
Even with those features on I find constantly outdated information these days.
Yup that article from 2012 Techcrunch with the broken links is really helping me Google.
Disclosure: Currently running an alternative search engine. However I legitimately don't like Google search or Google's practices in the search market, so much so it actually prompted us to throw our hat in the ring.
> Turn off all the data collection in Google and personalization from it and compare the results.
Yeah, Google has overtly for, IIRC, about a decade said they are focussing search improvements on personal and even predictive search, so, sure, disable that and the quality goes down.
But that just illustrates that, while there is an obvious advertising incentive for data collection, it actually is relevant to delivering useful search results.
I don't disagree that personalization is important, I disagree with the methods Google employs to collect that data and then that they also use it against the user on the advertising side. So yeah, Google does well by trampling all over ethics and privacy.
[0]Only 22% of consumers say they are okay with having their information collected indiscriminately by websites to provide a better experience.
Which means by that metric google abuses 88% of it's users unless they go through the means to turn the features off.
Informed consent, access and ownership are all pillars a modern site experience should have when it comes to data collection -- Google fails here and so does DDG in the opposite direction by just never asking which means they can't do any personalization.
The winner here is going to be someone who can provide the better ethical and functional experience. I firmly believe in the next 15 years we will see litigation in the US around data privacy just using California as the canary and Europe recently voted to get even stricter than the GDPR.
> [0]Only 22% of consumers say they are okay with having their information collected indiscriminately by websites to provide a better experience.
That isn't a quote from the referenced link. The quote is "Only 22 percent of consumers agreed that they would be willing to hand over personal data to improve experiences." - which is quite a different thing.
I'm not happy to hand over personal data to improve experiences. But I'm very happy for Google to track what searches I do to improve their results.
Uhhhhh but you hand over way more if you use google services.
Your right it's not a quote I didn't quote it, notice the lack of quotes. I'm also not sure how you are splitting hairs over "information collected indiscriminately" which would be a superset including personal data.
Like maybe it's not clear but google turns around and uses your information in search for ad targeting as well. You don't just improve search which would be largely innocuous but that's not their business.
> Turn off all the data collection in Google and personalization from it and compare the results. They go down in quality considerably in my experience.
Absolutely. I switched from Google to DDG and Qwant a few weeks ago and was surprised that I didn't see much differences.
But after discussing it with colleagues that were switching back to Google it became apparent that it was because I was siloing Google to its own browser, erasing cookies etc that made it as "inefficient" as the other search engines.
I actually started using edge at work (I work at ms) and I don’t find bing to be too bad, most searches I go to google for I don’t find a good answer there either. Given they are sometimes very obscure c++ questions. For everyday use though I find them both to be very similar
Those examples would be a solid reason for Apple to invest in improving their search tech, which could naturally lead to launching a non-Google search engine to use across Apple apps possibly including Safari...
It's worth mentioning that Apple's human review can be very incompetent. They rejected an update to iSH on TestFlight (https://ish.app) because the reviewer thought that the app's shell prompt was a "blank screen".
That said, in general, I appreciate the greater average quality of apps in the App Store.
A developer copies an open source app, adds advertisements, and publishes it to the play store as a closed source app. He promotes his app over the original app by paying Google.
I don't generally just browse apps so like if you know what you're looking for and go to it it's the same as if you searched an exact name on the apple one -- but if you're just browsing around it's got a lot of lower quality stuff.
It is important to not confuse Google Reader/Notes/Chat with Google Search. Google Search is the gateway to Google's vast profits and they put many of their best people on keeping the product top notch. There are probably hundreds of sub-models and thousands of optimizations that would take years to build out.
I think they win big on advertising because they auction keywords. That was a novel idea and the one really big economic success they have had which funds everything else. I don’t think they need to make search less good to get more money. They do put the add more and more prominently, but the raw search results seem to be steadily improving if you can get used to the idea they are now trying to understand your intent instead of just grep’ing the internet.
It’s not that they need to make it less good. It’s that they need to make it less controllable and flexible. They get paid for each keyword search you do that generates advertising clicks.
Most people seem to disagree with you about the raw results improving. They certainly don’t seem to be for me.
This is true, but not in a way you think. Conventional wisdom tells us that you're gonna need completely different approaches across the stack (not just technological but organizational as well) when a problem size grows 10x, and the web has grown about 100x from 2000.
Sort of. Google is paying Apple to not doing something else. When 8-12B is gone, Apple loses the incentive to not make something like DDG the default or build or buy their own search engine.
It’s worse but Google has closed the gap a lot over the last few years as they remove anything which advertisers aren’t asking for. I periodically tried DDG for years and always switched back but about a year ago I didn’t. I still use Google a few times a week but it’s increasingly for more obscure technical things and DDG is often winning those due to not having removed their advanced search operators.
Barring C-level change at Google I’m expecting the gap to disappear in a year or two.
Could this be because Google doesn't have to compete?
My impression is that Google Search is worse now than it was in the past. They've gotten complacent. So if they had to fight for users instead of taking them for granted through paying off Apple and Mozilla, then maybe Google would have to perform better. Everyone wins? (Except AAPL stockholders.)
I think much of the apparent deterioration of Google Search is because high-quality information is disappearing from the web. Google can't return results that don't exist.
If you Google '$PRODUCT review' and only get Amazon-affiliate scam sites pretending to be review sites, it's not because Google has been SEOed but rather because there are no actual reviews of $PRODUCT.
Aside from a botched update last year, where Google would only return results that were selling things, Google Search is still very good at finding information that exists.
Many of the only high quality review sites left (like Wirecutter) are partially monetized with referral links. I don't think this would be a good approach.
It's not partially, it is almost solely. And yes that creates conflict of interest, same one search engines have when they display ads.
When looking at a web page you nowadays have to wonder 'what is the purpose of this page?'. Unfortunately even sites like wirecutter exist more and more to drive revenue, rather than inform the user. The only types of pages where purpose is still non-commercial (in most cases) are discussions.
Did you say « Authentic reviews don’t exist »? Or did you say « Google doesn’t show us any authentic reviews, therefore they don’t exist »?
It is the pointer to monopolistic behavior: Being so influent that nothing exists outside the Google Search. We can’t affirm honest reviews don’t exist: I’m sure there are authentic comparators, in fact in France UFC Que Choisir is a pretty leftist comparison organization who explores products, compares them and even regularly sends companies to trial, a pretty good sign that they couldn’t care less for those companies in a way that is awesomely aligned with authenticity. I’m sure there are millions of other people writing reviews for pleasure.
Google chose not to show them, and to orient their search in the way they wanted, whatever it is, maybe they’re showing corporate sites first, or commercial sites first, making it impossible for amateurs to exist, making them « don’t exist ». It turns out it makes you feel like nothing is authentic. Therefore we turn back to Amazon or Google and buy any of the list, just trusting the biggest vendor. This probably innocuous wording of yours may be the key to the whole problem here.
My assumption is that authentic reviews don't exist, at least on the English-speaking web, to the extent that they did 10-20 years ago. Google doesn't find authentic reviews in most areas, but neither does DDG or Bing.
Google and DDG, however, are very good at finding authentic reviews in niche market segments where authentic reviews are still common. The fact that search engines can find these reviews suggests that the lack of authentic reviews for mainstream products is much more due to a lack of authentic reviews on the web rather than a problem with search engines.
I think it's less complacent than milking it: as long as they have such high market-share they can prioritize things which generate more profit for them until the point where users switch en masse. The risk, of course, is that someone like Bing or DDG will improve and they'll find less loyalty than they used to have but I'm sure they expect to be able to pivot back faster than people will bail.
I think any inferiority is mainly because DDG doesn't build a user profile. I tested this the other day by searching for 'rust'. On Google the entire first page of results were either about the programming language or some game. DDG had something about iron oxide as the third result.
Whenever I use DDG, I just have to remember that DDG does not have my personal profile, and adjust accordingly. Then the results are fine, and even better if I'm searching outside my normal profile.
I have. Also, I just checked my browser history of searches against DDG. I stand by what I said. What they're doing is impressive, but that's not the same thing as saying that they're on the same level of result quality as Google.
I have to use !g a lot because of inferior results from the default search. It can be tough to even get a relevant wikipedia entry to show up in the top 5.
I use DDG daily. It's fine for simple, popular, searches (e.g. finding the website of a company by name) but is completely useless for anything even remotely complicated or specialized.
DDG won't even return Stack ("Your question has been deleted as a duplicate") Overflow results for technical questions.
I disagree. Google has one strong point, which is "context search". For example, "song with the trumpet intro 90s" or something, will yield crap on DDG and a YouTube link to the song you had in your head on Google.
For any other search term, Google generally spams me with "answer boxes" that are universally slightly besides the point, while DDG gives me a clean page of relevant links.
Apple owned the outcome of that decision (and thus one of the world's best map services). They don't get that by pointing searches at DDG. In fact, even if they bought DDG, they wouldn't own DDG's search results, because DDG repackages other search engines.
Have you seen normal people using their iPhones and iPads? If so, did they ever change any default?
I have family members who I'd call "computer literate 101" (i.e. they can use e-mail, create a PowerPoint, buy something on the web). Their homescreen is a history of their apps downloads, everything just gets added to the next available space. They do not use folders, they do not move icons. They do not enable large text size even though it would help them see the text better. They do not change the default ringtone. They do not use "do not disturb" when they're in a restaurant.
The reason is, they don't even know these options exist. They have never opened the Settings app.
To change the default search engine, you need to go three screens deep in Settings.app.
If Google stops paying Apple and Apple changes the default (for new users) to Bing or whatever, 99.5% of new users will just use Bing.
There is probably going to be another search player willing to pay to be the default on Apple, with the increase of usage, due to being the default, they will make more money, with more money they will be able to improve their service faster.
Unless search quality is critical for Apple, which would be surprising seeing the search quality of Siri
I'm surprised by how many people are ok with this sort of pay to play. The search engine (or any other tech) that wins in the market should be the one best at being a search engine. Not the one willing to pay Apple the most money.
i'm not arguing that it's bad to pay to be the default. If the default service is worse than another people will switch to the other service. People install all kinds of apps on their phones, they can switch the default search engine too.
"just the default" seems to diminish the enormous importance of defaults.
changing "just the default" on organ donation to presumed consent w/ family veto, for instance, would essentially end all organ supply issues in the nation.
I would be interested in reading one of the studies in which the default was set to an inferior product and people stayed with the default despite there being a superior competitor and nearly zero effort required to switch.
not just money but data. the more data they get the better their search results get. and the better their results get the more money they get in a loop. meaning a startup can’t compete due to the sheer amount of data google has
Before Google was so aggressive about paying everyone to set themselves as the default search engine, Bing used to pay to be the only search option on a number of mobile devices and disable the ability to change that default (presumably because everyone would just switch back to Google). So for a while, a lot of Android devices sold by mobile networks in places like Europe forced searches to Bing with no way to change that.
If the Justice Department contines with this attempt to stop Google paying to be the default, I can easily see this ending in a situation where their non-search competitors are worse off financially and consumers have substantially less choice than they do now.
No money coming to Apple could have other effects, like more aggressive anonymization of search data, or even caching on Apple’s side, or any other technical setup that their contract prevents them from doing now.
Also Google is not the best engine everywhere nor for everyone.
I think a sign of this is if it was that simple Google wouldn’t be paying that much in the first place.
It would be a big hit.. but here’s where I think openAI has a big play and it’s a shame MSFT has exclusive access. You train gpt-3 to rank web pages and of course general knowledge.
I don't think it's that clear that that would be the outcome. If Apple was allowed to get payed by Bing, because they are not the market leader, I think some people would switch back to Google but many people would just keep Bing.
Also Apple could build its own search engine (using either google or bing as an api) or they could say buy DDG.
I can pretty much guarantee many tech-illiterate users will not really realize anything changed. Or they won‘t care.
Funny fact: check out the mobile version of bing.com. The MS logo is hidden from the viewport unless you scroll up. Almost as if MS is pretty ok with not advertising to people too much that they’re on their platform.
They might mandate that the user be asked to pick a search engine from a randomly-ordered list during initial setup. We've already been through this with Microsoft and web browsers.
If the list was allowed to include a short description provided by the search provider, and DDG's said something like "Your privacy is important. We never track you or record your searches.", many more people might choose DDG.
I've been using DDG since they first launched, and that simple promise was all it took to get me to try them out the first time I heard of them.
Let's not delude ourselves into thinking that DDG has even a percent of a percent of Google's brand recognition. The fact that we are even discussing this shows what sort of a bubble we are in. The vast vast majority of users in the real world don't know or care about DDG.
No matter what your opinion of the company, Google's brand reputation is well earned and pervasive, and it started and was built from scratch, as opposed to DDG which basically stuck its own logo on Bing's API.
It is an interesting exercise to look at the barriers to entry for search engines.
Clearly there are technology challenges (internet scale web crawler, indexer, search interface, ad technology) but these are not novel challenges anymore.
Funding is an issue as operating a general search index is likely very expensive with high upfront investment. Marginal costs are nearly zero as the major expense is likely fixed (crawling and indexing the internet) while variable costs are a small percentage (serving search results for each request).
Google, like Nike, Gucci, and Procter & Gamble, has spent billions to build their brand perception and cement the habit of using their products despite there often being minimal actual differences between competitive products.
But the critical one really does seem to be attracting new users. The history of DDG, ClickZ, Bing all seem to validate this. Just getting a user to _try_ a new search engine is very difficult despite it being "one click away." Certainly a deal with a browser maker / mobile manufacturer would aid this but it's priced amazingly out of the reach of competitors denying perhaps the most obvious way to get trials and traffic.
Google clearly knows this. How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
You're missing the most novel technology: ranking.
Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results).
You're right that drawing users is a big challenge, but privacy gives you a way in there (again DDG). It just isn't enough if you can't provide better results.
Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.
Which is extremely expensive in engineering time because ranking isn't static but rather a constant war with gaming.
Thanks for pointing out ranking search results as a technology investment required; I tend to think of it as part of indexing but a good call out.
I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google.
DDG results aren't "bad" as such but they're not as good as the Google results. The three videos that DDG gives me at the top of the SERP are totally irrelevant and the Wikipedia panel DDG offers is while not completely unrelated still doesn't address my query.
The google results contain no irrelevant videos, no knowledge panel, just ten research papers. Much better results.
I'm not sure either matter, ultimately. It's the industrial structure, rather than the demands of the job (provide a good search engine) that matter here.
In order to be a sustainable google competitor, you need to be a competing search business, not just a competing search engine. The business model is such that market share affects unit value. A search business with 1% of google's traffic (or 1% of fb's social traffic) does not make 1% os google's revenue. More scale, more unit value.
Meanwhile, the way most/many small search engines monetize is via adwords. Adwords has already been found guilty (EU court) of abusing this nasty grip on their (minimal) competition's revenue avenue.
I actually don't see 3 pinterest results, maybe there is some personalization at play. However you can't compare results based on just one search query. Not to mention that your query is probably quite common. It's easy for a search engine to return good results for common queries. The difficulty of search is in the long-tail.
Bing invested billions of dollar into search. They had traditional advertising including celebrity endorsements. They were unable to compete with Google on quality.
Google has large team of engineers working on search quality and they evaluate each change using human raters.
> Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.
I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).
Yeah, I too often think that Google search quality is decreasing. But I am not sure anyone can do better given current tech, because search engine metrics are almost always gamed.
There are some limited solutions. If they allow to filter out pages full of tracking and ads, it will filter out lot of shit content, but that probably harms their business model. They might have allowed to exclude some sites from search, too..
You clearly underestimate the complexity of turning 4 keywords into 3 links that answer these keywords. This is so hard that even Google is not very good at it. But Google is way better than the competition.
Only the crawler infrastructure you need to populate your index requires several thousands of dollars of server per month, that's a lot for a company without founding. Then you need to remove spam, you need to understands each document that you crawl, you need to rank them, ...
A simple exercise that you can do is to just do a search for your personal knowledge base, you will see that it is much harder that you thought
I could be wrong but I always thought the fact Google has such high penetration of Google Analytics makes their ranking a lot easier. They can see how much time users spend on site and other behaviour. This must make it a lot easier to know which results are "good".
"Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps. See our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process data for each of these purposes and our Advertising page for more about Google ads, how your information is used in the context of advertising, and how long Google stores this information."
Yeah wasn't sure if that's the case or not. Why else would the offer analytics for free though? It's been (relatively) recently they've allowed people to import GA sessions for retargetting. Always thought it was for being able to improve rankings.
They charge for it above a certain volume and for various enterprise features. It’s always integrated well with Google Ads. I imagine it also boxes out other companies who might want that data.
Yeah. I have made DDG my default but for specific queries (e.g. not “IMDb Manchurian candidate” but “terraform aws_subnet data”) I end up going back to google like half the time.
I imagine user clicks are an important signal which helps a search engine refine its results. If no one ever clicks on a particular link for they were shown when searching for "foo", then there's something about that link that makes it a less attractive result.
>> How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
When stuff gets paradoxicalish, it can be because the paradigm/model is wrong.
In this case, the model is the economic-legal model formulating monopoly theories and antitrust legislation. They were thinking mostly in terms of factories. Thinking of "barriers to entry" in terms of fixed/marginal costs makes a different kind of sense for factories.
You can't pay an $nbn "fixed cost" price to "build a fb." That's like the old outsourcing joke/prank: Job: Build me an app that makes $1m. Will pay $10k. It also isn't factory unit economics that determines success for a Google, FB or many other modern mega-businesses. Owning 1% of fb's social media traffic does not yield 1% of fb or adwords' revenue. It's more of a "rewards to scale" than an "economies of scale" thing. Revenue goes up. Unit cost may go down, but that's besides the point for fb or adwords ad revenues. The scale itself matters, not the savings it generates.
TLDR: trying to examine google's anatomy using a model based on Bell or Ford circa 1929 will result in confusing questions.
Meanwhile, monopolies have a logic of their own. They're valuable, and therefore worth paying to have. That's how deals like this should be viewed, imo. It's strong circumstantial evidence of monopoly. The deal, in itself, shouldn't be the object of objection.
I think, as with all anti-trust/anti-competitive questions, if you define the scope wrong then of course the entity claiming unfair practices can be positioned to win. "A deal that controls the internet" is really a pretty sweeping claim!
Is the question whether this deal prevents companies from developing and selling their search solution? If so, then is Google paying Apple, who has what, 40% market share of mobile phones, really able to stifle the development of search engines? With search on mobile phones being a further x% fraction of all (general, browser-opening) search being done on the internet? I.e. when placed with desktop, tablet, browser window search as well.
If we're down to perhaps low double digit % of all search, how it that unfairly preventing competition?
And yes, if you then go to the opposite extreme and say that the market is search on Safari on iPhones, then the market is cornered and controlled by Google. But is that reasonable to define as the market in question? Where you're entitled to not have anti-competitive behavior? That's Peter Thiel's example of having cornered the market for British food in downtown Palo Alto and prevented competitors from moving into your rented space.
It may be a sweetheart deal for Apple, and Google making sure that it gets preferred treatment in this one corner of the internet, but it seems to me hard to claim that this has stifled competition for the development of search engines in general?
> If so, then is Google paying Apple, who has what, 40% market share of mobile phones, really able to stifle the development of search engines?
Isn't the other 60% basically just (Google's) Android?
And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
Then why didn't they go after that instead? That's even more blatant if so.
> And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
Wait, now we need to make sure others can develop a good search engine? That's what fairness in competition is?
That's a whole new level of argument. I cannot imagine a court wanting to step into that territory.
Wait, I am very interested to know this condition.
Not only does a Google or Intel or whoever need to not artificially prevent competition, it has to ensure that its competitors offer actually good alternatives? How can you put a responsibility on a party for the capabilities of someone else?
Legally, no. Monopolies do not generally need to aid their competitors to the point that they produce viable products. At times, however, monopolies do provide token support to competitors to reduce the risk of anti-trust enforcement. See, for example, Microsoft supporting Apple in the 1990s and Google supporting Mozilla.
Definitionally, companies without viable competitors are monopolies. Microsoft still has a defacto monopoly on PC operating systems as Linux isn't a viable choice for 95%+ of PC users. This market situation is extremely detrimental to consumers but isn't illegal.
Having a monopoly isn’t illegal. Using a monopoly to give you market power in another area is illegal. Windows can have a monopoly perfectly legally, they just can’t use that monopoly to give themselves a monopoly on, say, web browsers.
I take "stifling the development of search engines" to mean Google using its position to prevent someone from engaging in the software development of code, trying to sell any alternative to its offering, preventing market entry at all.
I just think it's a whole other level of argument to say that someone not having access to the same data and only being able to develop an inferior search technology = anticompetitive. (where the "not having as good data" part is not done by denying other competitors access to some resource that they should have a right to, or could equally gather on their own)
Indeed, and by defining the market as search, which people don’t pay for, rather than internet advertising, which people do, you can obscure what’s going on still further.
It is when it's already a sunk cost that would've already been invested even without the search deal, resulting in the incremental cost to add a Google default next to zero.
There's no reason for this recurring payment to be compared against revenue when it's essentially pure-profit contribution that cost Apple close to 0 marginal cost to implement.
It cost Mozilla 0 marginal costs to make google their default search engine, yet it was their primary source of revenue and funded their organisation almost entirely for many years. That certainly didn't make all their google search bar revenue profit. Also as Apple sell more devices they can and do charge Google more, so making better phones and marketing them well, both of which incur costs, earns more search bar revenue. That's direct causal line between costs and that revenue. The fact they also have other revenue doesn't change that. Whole companies have failed because the owners bought that fallacy and fundamentally misunderstood how their own business worked.
As tptacek pointed out, it did not cost Apple close to 0 marginal cost to implement.
Apple spent a lot and continues to spend a lot to retain its enormous share of wealthy users, which is why Google pays as much as it does to be default. Exactly how much to attribute is probably impossible to calculate, but certainly not close enough to zero to call it pure profit.
Were we to think about the pro forma AAPL sans the payments, it’d come out of revenue, and then we’d pull 100% of it out of profit, and probably add a bit more of a hit for the inevitable R&D done to start working on their own search.
Why not say that money goes towards paying employees, or server farm costs? You can’t say that this revenue here goes to this cost, or that revenue there goes to another cost, and some other revenue is special because that’s the profit.
Apple made this deal with Google before the iPhone was even launched and arguably among the first revenue sources they ever had, and the revenue from it has risen as the value of that search bar has risen, along with their other revenue. It’s plausible to argue it’s enabled them to invest more in developing the phones and iOS, so without it their expenses might have been lower.
Another thing to consider is if Apple didn’t sell this deal to Google, they’d probably be making a deal with Microsoft to replace it with Bing, or Yandex in Russia, or whatever. It doesn’t only have value to Google, they might make less but still it would be a lot, so really the revenue that’s uniquely ‘Googly’ from an Apple perspective is just the delta of the extra they make from Google.
Was the same true when the Google deal money was the only money they had made, as I pointed out, before they sold a single iPhone? Was it pure profit then?
We have an exact counter example. When Mozilla was almost entirely dependent on Google search bar revenue would you say the same thing of them? By definition it’s all profit because it cost nothing to make Google the default ... except most of it went to pay operational costs because their other revenue was very small. Even supposing they then get more other revenue from other sources, you can’t suddenly say search bar revenue has switched from going here to going there. It doesn’t make any sense.
Also the Google revenue to Apple has scaled with devices sold, sell no devices make no Google money. Increase sales and you can demand more from google. It’s all predicated on making and selling devices, which takes people.
Which number looks more correct to you? I guess it depends on how you use the number, but from my perspective, the lack of costs means that its more logical to compare it to Revenue as a whole.
Note: Operating Profit is "Revenue-RecurringCosts" (without one-time-costs associated). Operating Profit would be "more correct" if this were a hypothetical decision with recurring costs. (The one-time-costs would just muddle the discussion).
> this is a time to use revenue instead of profits
Totally the opposite. Capital projects are greenlit on profits. The profits Google delivers to Apple are a better argument against it building its own search engine than the revenues.
we do know the number was 1B in 2014 when oracle blurted it out in court.
We know Mozilla's numbers for a similar type of deal from that era and now. We also how market share and absolute devices have trended from 2014 to now.
Apple' s dominance in mobile and mobile as platform having a larger impact on search then web.
Putting it altogether 8-12B is a fair estimate.
To see it another way, if google is ready to pay mozilla $500 M / year with a browser in single digit market share and predominant presence only in web, 20x to apple is pretty easy
Only on here could people say that the engineering challenges Google faces in delivering search are 'solved problems' that could be easily mimicked.
I get that people don't like the surveillance tech business model, I don't really like it myself. But we can't just pretend that the personal data that they gather to serve you ads more effectively isn't also the reason their search results, at least in my experience, are better than their competitors'.
It is a solved problem for big tech , apple already has one with siri suggested site.
Just like maps. Apple one day decided google maps is no longer thr default and implemented their own. Sure they had bad early years and hilarious issues, however they are on par or comparable to google maps today.
And I suspect this is why Apple doesn't implement its own search index / service.
If I were at Apple and I had payments like this coming in, I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine. This because Google can 'turn off' this at any moment, so having that be a non-threat would be useful. Further there is a tremendous amount of value in crawling the web in terms of data set generation. And finally it really would allow them to build knowledge bases that would enable Siri to be more effective as a verbal assistant.
But while the cash is pouring in like that? Well just ride that fountain of cash for as long as you can.
Apple does implement its own search index and service.
It just doesn’t using it to compete with Google head on currently.
I’m guessing that their strategy would be to continue to integrate search results across the os gradually, rather than building a straight up Google competitor.
Yep - I imagine the "siri suggested site" thing is a preview (and threat) that Apple has a search engine in its back pocket that it's ready to roll out whenever.
The way I think about it, Google's interests aren't aligned with Apple's interests.
Think about the money that Apple has invested in their own bespoke ARM chips. They could have stuck with Broadcom or Samsung chips for the iPhone but they didn't. They wanted things that they couldn't get access to through a supplier, and a competitive advantage.
If I were an executive at Apple I would look at the risk every supplier contributed to overall profitability and margins. And I would look to see how much value I could capture for Apple vs paying it out to third parties.
So for me the question is about "How much of the user experience can I ensure will meet my standards?" and having your own search engine would help there. There are other values as well when you can make large scale semantic queries against the entire web. And it can be extremely lucrative to tie the "search experience" as a feeder into your other products (which is part of what the Justice department doesn't like about Google)
That logic made no sense at all. The money Apple spends developing its own CPUs is a fraction of the money they would have had to spend anyway to buy vendor CPUs. But they don't have to buy search. Search buys them! Developing their own search would convert search from a gigantic revenue stream with 100% gross margins into a massive operating expense. It's the opposite of making their own CPUs.
Presumably if Apple developed their own search engine they'd also have ads which would make similar (or higher) profit that Google makes from search ads.
Maybe, but it's a fair bet that they'd have the same or higher fixed costs, lower traffic, and the same or lower revenue per search. Apple hasn't really demonstrated that they can operate data infrastructure at that scale with Google's cost structure (nobody has, but especially not Apple).
It makes a ton of sense. If you could have google quality search without the tracking or ads, imaging how many more iPhones Apple would sell, and how much more people would be willing to pay for them.
Using tests that are similar to what Google used internally to measure search quality in the 2006 - 2010 time frame, a side by side comparison Bing and Google have equal search quality and on contested searches like "good mortgage rate" Google's search quality is actually worse.
I can't dispute that this is accurate for you, but for me I'm not seeing it. Bing gives me a knowledge box that says "Average Mortgage Rates Today" and lists a table with 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARM and an average rate for each.
That would be a good result but despite the title the rates are from 2018.
Google gives me bankrate.com in the #1 paid and the #1 organic position. This seems like a superior result.
In general I think it is hard to judge search quality from a query like this which is incredibly lucrative for search engines. There's an adversarial process between quality, SEO, and advertisers.
> I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine.
I'd be surprised if one of the conditions for the lucrativeness of this payment is paying Apple to not compete in Google's bread & butter, which is why I don't see there's any risk that Google would stop paying for placement whilst iOS maintains its valuable user base.
If they do decide to pull the plug Apple can always acquire DDG and give themselves a head start to building a competitor.
Acquiring DDG wouldn't give them much of a head start as its value is mostly anonymizing Bing searches. Apple could just work out a deal directly with Microsoft instead.
They'd acquire DDG if they wanted a jump start into creating their own search technology. DDG does have a DuckDuckBot crawler & obviously lots of staff & expertise in the area (Apple more acqui-hires than anything else). I don't know of a more appropriate Search company they could acquire to give them a headstart given Bing isn't for sale & MSFT is non acquirable.
If Google did decide to drop the payment they'd most definitely turn & collect placement checks from Bing as their first recourse, but if they wanted to build their own search technology they wouldn't be sourcing their results from Bing, they'd want to make sure they're masters of their own fate and own (or license) the technology & expertise themselves like they're doing with Apple Maps.
But I don't see any of this happening, the placement payments benefits both Companies.
Apple does certain things well but the kind of area that a quality search engine falls in kind of feels out of their capabilities. They've struggled to get Maps to be useable and Siri is pretty bad despite being the first virtual assistant.
Currently yes. However if they spent the whole $14 billion a year it wouldn't take long for apple to pull it off. I dont know what google spends on their search algorithm, but it cant be orders of magnitude more than $14 billion annually.
That the numbers don't seem to add up probably means you are misinterpreting them.
Apple has half the phone business by revenue, not by number of phones, never mind by value delivered. But to advertisers, that is the number that matters.
Apple customers are extra-valuable to pitch to, because they have already demonstrated that (1) price doesn't matter to them (or they would have a different phone), (2) they are easily satisfied (or they would have a different phone), (3) they are readily manipulated (or they...), and (4) they are especially status-conscious (...).
All those qualities make them what business schools like to call "cash cows" (yes, really) that can be milked indefinitely. Apple is renting them out to Google at a high rate. Google knows that practically all iphone users would never change the search engine on their own initiative, because iphone users have been very carefully trained, over the years, to take exactly what Apple dishes out and learn to like it.
Apple knows that renting out their customers doesn't cost Apple direct income, because they have already spent on everything Apple has.
Knowing that somebody is an Apple user, you can offer them top-drawer prices and they will pay, provided a high-status logo is attached, and feel smug about having paid it. They are buying "price-signaling" mojo, so they don't demand commensurate value, and are cheap to cater to.
> (1) price doesn't matter to them (or they would have a different phone)
I’m an iPhone user and price matters to me. Status means little to me.
Privacy is my priority and number one reason I use an iPhone. Apple is not an advertising company, and doesn’t make a buck selling my data. FYI my mobile search default is DDG.
Doesn't apple have an ad network or something like that for app store? That means they have to give that data to advertising partners right? At least Google has the data on your own servers.
I can support an advertising company rather than supporting a company that patents trivial features of programming languages and rounded corners of phones, not to mention deceptive advertising tactics.
> Apple is not an advertising company, and doesn’t make a buck selling my data.
Instead they (mean to) make a buck selling you to Google, who is and does.
Using DDG, and caring about price, puts you in the negligible 1% of iPhone users who fail to substantially reduce the value of Google's subscription investment.
It’s amazing that people carry on with the trope even after Apple brings out a $400 iPhone.
Not to mention iPhones have received software updates for far longer than anyone else for over a decade and they clearly have the lowest amortized costs.
I love coming to HN to read well-thought-out, clearly researched takes like "Apple customers are idiots because if they weren't idiots they wouldn't be buying Apple products"
Thank you, but if you want to paraphrase it, you could say "Every year, Google bets $8G-12G that Apple customers are still cash cows, and Apple agrees, so demands that much."
Mozilla sells its users for only, what, $200M?, because they clearly are worth just that much less, to Google.
I'm all for anti-trust action, and especially legislation, against Google and other large corporations with app stores and ads and other things perverting otherwise decent product interactions. But this just seems like a terrible way to frame the nature of Google's anti-consumer behavior.
Well now, that is an interesting question! I don't know much about the historical use of "payola" that record labels would pay DJs to play their songs. It's interesting that the libertarians would say "So what?" Most of us though would recognize the conflict-of-interest, just like we require people to at least tell us that certain speech is paid. Maybe that's the comprimise that would work here - Apple would keep Google as the default, but add a clear notice that they'd been paid, and how much. "Keep default search? Google paid us 12B USD for this value, are you sure?" Maybe it will get people questioning why the Goog wants search traffic so badly. And ad traffic. And DNS traffic. And video consumption traffic. And...
What bothers me the most is that of all the anti-competitive activities which Apple and Google engage in, this is the one which is given the most attention in the media.
It's a bit of a stretch to claim that DuckDuckGo is 'the little guy'. Yes, DuckDuckGo is small relative to Google, but it's still an insanely successful company.
Imagine what Google is doing to millions of small businesses by slightly tweaking its algorithm every few months... That's the real damage. These are the real casualties.
We're taking the focus away from millions of casualties who experience real suffering and directing it towards a single company which is doing well anyway.
The pain of the actual 'little guy' is 100x what the CEO of DuckDuckGo feels. It's total and absolute hopelessness.
When Google tweaks its algorithms, some other business will win if another suffers. I would imagine changes are done for a reason, e.g. site A has better reviews than site B.
Businesses which benefit Google and Google insiders. That means big corporations which Google has long term advertising deals with, VC-backed startups which Google plans to acquire at a discount and other businesses which have a connection to Google insiders (startup of the project manager's friend, ...). I'm not suggesting that they tweak the algorithm to benefit specific websites (they probably don't), but they tweak it to favor certain characteristics which, on the whole, benefit Google and Google insiders. Don't forget that Google employees are not a representative sample of the population by any measure.
What kinds of businesses tend to lose?
Businesses that are not affiliated with Google or Google insiders. Independent projects.
The reason why people at Google don't acknowledge that this is happening is because the harm is literally being inflicted on those businesses which are in Google's blind spots so they don't even see the problems... Except on rare occasions when they are shocked to realize that 50% of the population voted for Trump.
“Apple and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, worth more than $3 trillion combined, do compete on plenty of fronts, like smartphones, digital maps and laptops.”
This line makes it sound like Apple and Google have the same parent company. Should it read “Apple, and Google’s...”
What is written is correct, and your additional punctuation doesn't improve it, but it uses poorly chosen wording. It would be better to just use the simple names as the main items in the list, and say “Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company, [...]”
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
What? Worldwide, iOS market share is peanuts compared to Android. Depending on the report, the exact amount varies pretty widely, but nothing ever seems to report more than 18-ish percent worldwide. macOS is negligible. Meanwhile, Android’s market share is enormous.
Android devices alone—worldwide—could easily account for half of Google’s search traffic, especially when you consider countries like India. But the DOJ wants to argue that:
1. Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2. Half of Google’s traffic comes from Apple devices
If we believe that 92% figure, that places a generous upper limit of Google’s search traffic originating from Apple devices at about 20%, far short of “nearly half.”
Look, I hate the monopolistic nature of search just as much as the next person, but can we please double-check that our numbers actually make sense?