[HN Gopher] Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari se...
___________________________________________________________________
Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari search engine in
2021
Author : miles
Score : 331 points
Date : 2021-08-26 07:43 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (9to5mac.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (9to5mac.com)
| fsflover wrote:
| > After another meeting between Apple and Google senior
| executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is
| that we work as if we are one company."
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28238317
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| This is monopolistic collusion which regulators may well try to
| address in various ways indicated including interoperability.
| Self-evidently the deal suits Google and Apple. If Microsoft
| outbid Google then it would simply replace one bilateral deal of
| collusion between 2 of the 5 GAFAMs, with another.
|
| All the other 4 search choices in Safari are Bing. Whatever they
| say (and some are more transparent than others) Duck, Ecosia and
| Yahoo are Bing. So you might argue the whole search choice menu
| is 3-way GAFAM collusion.
|
| The way to help users, and indeed customers who use search
| advertising, would be to allow easy use of multiple search
| engines on browsers. I want to be able to easily use all or some
| of crawlers Google, Bing, Mojeek, syndicates Duck, Ecosia,
| Startpage and others like Brave .... with one click the way I can
| on Firefox, or in other ways. Wouldn't you like that?
|
| No one search engine, or syndicate if you prefer to use those,
| can be the search or "answer" engine which will always be best.
| We get more value as users if we have a healthy market with
| multiple choices for search, and an easy way to use them all.
|
| But then I would say this; self-disclosure CEO of Mojeek - an
| independent no-tracking search engine.
| nova22033 wrote:
| This is no different from Fast Food restaurants carrying
| Pepsi(or Coke) products exclusively.
|
| _If Microsoft outbid Google then it would simply replace one
| bilateral deal of collision between 2 of the 5 GAFAMs, with
| another._
|
| Yes...Just like Pepsi can offer a fast food company a better
| deal to carry Pepsi products exclusively
| xdennis wrote:
| > This is no different from Fast Food restaurants carrying
| Pepsi(or Coke) products exclusively.
|
| No it's not. No soft drink has 91% market share.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| This comment is a great example of _whataboutism_.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| No the comment is to show that this is standard business
| practice that goes back further than any of us have been
| alive. BTW, MCDonalds has such a s sweet deal that they
| will never leave. AKA they will always pay the lowest price
| for the Coke syrups out of any of Coke's vendors. Giving
| you a cup, lid and straw cost more than filling up that cup
| with a Coke product.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| Monopolistic practices indeed go _back further than any
| of us have been alive_ , and so do most crimes. That
| doesn't mean it's not bad and shouldn't be fought
| against...
|
| Excusing a bad situation by pointing to another situation
| equally bad doesn't make the situation less bad, it's
| just sophism. (And I won't even argue that there's at
| least an order of magnitude in the sums involved and that
| the consequences in terms of individual freedom of the
| two situations are of completely different scale,sibling
| comments have done so already).
| singron wrote:
| I think there is a big difference in that there are only 2
| mobile OSes and users stick with the same one for years.
|
| Imagine there were only 2 restaurants and 99% of people went
| exclusively to the same one every day for years.
| mcphage wrote:
| After the franchise wars, now all restaurants are Taco
| Bell.
| bko wrote:
| Mobile OSes are not restaurants. Believe it or not, but
| people are pretty happy with their mobile OSes. We've seen
| phone usage increase and stay very high. And people dish
| out up to $2k for new devices. People continue to spend a
| lot on phones and replace them often.
|
| You can not like certain practices of Google or Apple or
| aspects of their privacy policy, but don't gaslight
| yourself by saying that somehow the average device consumer
| is terribly concerned or hurt in any meaningful direct way.
| Most people like their phones and when you get a well
| funded competitor like Blackberry or Amazon or even Google
| hardware, people shrug and go back to Samsung/Apple
| singron wrote:
| I don't think a disagree. I think this is exactly what
| makes this so tricky. On the consumer side, users have a
| choice, pick their favorite, occasionally switch when
| they buy a new phone, and are generally content.
|
| However on the supply side, there are 2 disjoint
| monopolies. You reach iOS users through Apple's monopoly
| on iOS distribution, and you reach Android users through
| Google's [near-]monopoly on Android distribution.
|
| To continue the hurt analogy, it's the difference between
| there being 2 restaurant chains in every town and there
| being 1 restaurant chain for the Eastern US and a
| different chain for the Western US (and moving across the
| country cost $400-$800).
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| The question isn't whether people like their mobile OSs.
| It's whether there is meaningful competition in the
| mobile OS space.
|
| The only two mobile OS providers of any significance
| colluding together is not a good indicator of meaningful
| competition.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| That was practically the case in the early- to mid- 2000s
| with McDonalds and Burger King.
| ColinHayhurst wrote:
| Good point. Is that healthy? Perhaps you don't mind but I
| would like to be able to choose between Pepsi and Coke too;
| when buying for someone else. At least in most restaurants I
| can personally choose also from other brands with more
| healthy products.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| But thre are literally millions of fast food restaurants to
| choose from, accessible to everyone.
|
| In mobile space, we basically have two OSes with their
| default browsers and search engine, and in browser space we
| have three, and all of them basically use one of the two
| search engines (and their derivatives).
| ralfd wrote:
| There are millions of websites to choose from. The best
| (most convenient to reach) places in cites or on highways
| will be the big chains.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Firefox presents Yandex search by default for me. I guess
| Yandex outbid Google in my country.
| [deleted]
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| And I always switch it to something else... $15B wasted as far as
| I matter. :-)
| srg0 wrote:
| So if it's true that there are 1B active iPhone users, then
| Google pays $15 per user per year.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| What you really want to ask about is the ARPU metric, or
| Average Revenue Per User:
|
| https://mondaynote.com/the-arpus-of-the-big-four-dwarf-every...
|
| Google gets revenues of about $256 per user per year, mostly
| from search ad impressions. That's the context for this $15 per
| user deal; their ROI is nearly 20x.
|
| For context, Apple makes about $30 on services like iCloud per
| user; if you factor in hardware sales every 2 years or so their
| revenue is $194/user/year. Facebook makes about $112 per
| US/Canadian user. Amazon is the big ARPU winner, making $752
| per user per year based on $120/year Prime memberships plus
| sellers giving them their fee of approximately 15% fee + $5
| shipping prices.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Ah, they joy of holding two conflicting thoughts at the same
| time! Like, Apple does not sell user data to third parties and
| Apple is sending all search traffic to Google by default for $15b
| a year.
| bko wrote:
| What's the alternative? Should Safari choose a default search
| engine by random per user or per session? Google is undoubtedly
| the best search engine in nearly all cases. Should Apple
| subject its users to a weaker engine just because Google has a
| different privacy policy? You can also change the default
| search engine.
|
| Why wouldn't Apple accept a payment for bringing billions of
| dollars in traffic to Google?
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Apple subjects it's user to a highest bidder. You can't
| seriously try to claim Apple is using Google as "best search
| engine" minute after seeing they are getting 15B for it.
| bko wrote:
| Google is by far the best search engine.
|
| Google pays Apple to set it as the default as its a
| positive sum to both sides. Google gets more than $15bn of
| value from the traffic and Apple gets $15bn for the obvious
| decision. Google could call Apple's bluff and refuse to
| pay, but Apple could pull through on their threat to
| replace default search with an inferior engine. They did it
| with Google Maps by replacing it with Apple Maps, which was
| a widely unpopular decision
| selectodude wrote:
| They did it with Google and replaced it with Bing awhile
| back.
| danielrpa wrote:
| Weaker... According to whom? I particularly use DDG on my
| personal devices and only _occasionally_ go to Google.
| Whenever I 'm using a machine that use Google as the default,
| I _often_ go back to DDG to get results unspoiled by the bias
| pushed by Google 's agenda, SEO and paid ads.
|
| But answering your question, it could let the user choose
| their search engine as part of the onboarding experience
| while providing a random preselected default.
| shukantpal wrote:
| How many people actually want to switch from Google?
| supermatt wrote:
| I think the bigger question is how many people would
| notice a switch? My family members now "google" stuff on
| DDG.
|
| Google are paying tens of billions to keep them in the
| "default" dominant position because they know this.
| Smashure wrote:
| Google results have fallen dramatically in terms of
| quality. I'd switch from current Google to Google circa
| 2018
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I've been using Brave:
|
| https://search.brave.com/
|
| For my usage it gives good results, and it has the added
| bonus of providing links to google et al when you scroll
| down the results (it assumes that if the first page of
| results isn't good enough then the user will go elsewhere,
| so why not provide links to the other search engines?).
| bryan0 wrote:
| I wanted to try brave, but it's not even an option for
| safari iOS search main search bar! Only options are
| Google, yahoo, bing, ddg, and ecosia
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Could you set it as your home-page? Obviously not as nice
| as going via the URL-bar, but at least you'll be able to
| get a taste of it.
| bryan0 wrote:
| Yes but honestly if it's not in the url bar I'm not going
| to use it.
| abrowne wrote:
| +1 for Brave search. I had used DDG for a couple years
| before and it was fine, but Brave actually seems good.
|
| (I don't like their font but that's an easy fix with
| userstyles.)
| coldcode wrote:
| Wouldn't it be cheaper for Apple to just buy DDG or
| Brave?
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| I think you might be right.
| SimeVidas wrote:
| "Apple makes is very easy to stop sending your user data to
| third parties."
|
| Better?
| cronix wrote:
| It's kind of like how the NSA has deals with other countries
| like the UK to allow spying on Americans to get around
| constitutional issues. Hey, _we_ didn 't do the spying! We're
| privacy focused. We just make billions by allowing other
| companies to spy on you, and we make it the default position.
| Plausible deniability at the corporate level.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Apple makes it easy enough to switch the "search engine used
| from the URL bar" if you care to.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Well, Google is the best search engine, and Apple wants the
| best user experience. This has the feel of getting paid $15b to
| do something you were going to do anyways.
| snarf21 wrote:
| If Apple popped up a list on install of search engines to
| pick from, 99% of people would pick Google anyway. Google is
| mostly afraid they will buy a startup and have their own or
| make the same deal with M$. At $15B of pure bottom line, it
| is an easy choice for Apple. We can only stop this with taxes
| on digital advertising. The tracking companies have become
| too good at fingerprinting. Even if everything was completely
| random and anonymized from the iPhone side, the carriers/ISPs
| can fingerprint you so much easier and they'll never stop
| (probably not even with regulation).
| rchaud wrote:
| Google search is completely gamed, as are Bing and others
| that rely on the same list of ranking factors. Besides the
| visual difference between Bing/Google results page, I doubt
| iPhone users would be able to tell who was serving the
| results.
| funnyThing7 wrote:
| Makes me wonder why they have to pay 15b in the first place.
| If it's indeed a no-brainer for apple, the deal could be made
| with far less money?
| tnzm wrote:
| I'd imagine with $15B Apple could bootstrap its own search
| engine.
| JiNCMG wrote:
| Not worth it. It's not cheap maintaining a search engine.
| Apple could throw resources at it but what is the
| benefit? This is different than the Maps issue where
| Google refuse to provide new features for iPhone Maps.
| Apple used OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and created their own. By
| using OSM, it gave that project more visibility and
| others an alternative solution to Google Maps. A few
| years later Google suddenly makes it "not so free" for
| businesses displaying a map, they better put up a credit
| card.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| There are getting 15B to NOT boostrap their search
| engine. If they bootstrap their own engine, they loose
| 15B on top of having to pay to build this own engine.
| tnzm wrote:
| Exactly. Plenty of risks involved - they could just fail
| like Microsoft did, or if they pull it off it could
| seriously upset the balance in the ecosystem. Better
| reach a mutually beneficial agreement with everyone's
| "favorite" search company instead. Coopetition lol
| [deleted]
| theklub wrote:
| Is it the best search engine anymore? Seems like the web is
| an seo hellhole when I'm looking for real information.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Yes.
|
| I use DDG as my default. The bang syntax is great for quick
| pivots and for wikipedia-like information. However, digging
| deep into a topic or doing certain technical searches
| brings up SEO hell/malicious PDFs worse than Google ever
| does.
| rcoveson wrote:
| The other day I was watching somebody search "Mass Effect
| Legendary Edition Ultrawide Support" while logged in to
| Google. They repeatedly got nothing but results for Heroes
| of the Storm, a completely different game which they had
| been playing a few days earlier. It was the creepiest
| thing. HotS is not a very popular game. I guarantee that
| most people searching "$VIDEO_GAME Ultrawide Support" are
| not looking for HotS info.
|
| Anyway, on Bing and DDG both the first page of results were
| what I would have expected. Just like they would have been
| on Google ten years ago.
| readams wrote:
| That query works well for me on Google.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I don't doubt it. I believe it was a results
| personalization issue. A history of queries related to
| one game caused it to include that game in all game-
| related queries. Maybe exacerbated by the
| heroes:legendary relationship? Who knows. I don't even
| recognize the Google algorithm year to year anymore. I
| don't expect to be able to reproduce anything.
| urthor wrote:
| It's the best algorithm I would say, but the site itself
| has quite horrid design these days.
| cdogl wrote:
| I've encouraged numerous non-technical friends and family
| members to switch to DuckDuckGo and they've all gone back
| to Google within a week.
| iKevinShah wrote:
| Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I
| still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG
| disappoints. and that happens frequently (although
| definitely not always)
| maxk42 wrote:
| I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may
| not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom
| have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.
| tomerv wrote:
| That's my experience as well. I'm on DDG for a few months
| now, and I often resort to using Google when DDG doesn't
| give me the results I want.
| rchaud wrote:
| How much of that is down to them missing the familiar
| look of the Google results page?
|
| I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked
| to use a white-labeled search page where the results are
| served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed.
| They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3
| months, and rank their satisfaction with it.
|
| I imagine the results would be similar, but people would
| still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around
| for 20 years.
| cromwellian wrote:
| I dont understand how people make these claims. For web
| search, Google is obviously better but for other classes
| of queries like question answering of structured
| knowledge or video search, it's way better.
|
| Ask DuckDuckGo for "Shang chi cast" and compare that with
| Google.
|
| Or look at how it now returns search results that contain
| deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is
| relevant.
|
| (I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you
| search for that it will return deep links into a
| videobert presentation!)
|
| In any case Apple would have along long way to go to
| match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just
| TFIDF and 20 blue links.
| Kye wrote:
| Microsoft did something like this almost a decade ago.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/bing-it-on-microsoft-
| claim...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing#Bing_It_On
|
| It was marginal, in favor of Bing, though I don't think
| they did extended experiments with individuals.
| Tarsul wrote:
| I really think DDG should at least search for results of
| "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying
| for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more
| than Google.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Apple does not sell user data to third parties
|
| Oh, of course they do:
|
| > Apple's Sharing of Personal Data
|
| > Apple may share personal data with service providers who act
| on our behalf, our partners, or others at your direction.
| Further, Apple does not share personal data with third parties
| for their own marketing purposes.
|
| > Partners. At times, Apple may partner with third parties to
| provide services or other offerings. For example, Apple
| financial offerings like Apple Card and Apple Cash are offered
| by Apple and our partners. Apple requires its partners to
| protect your personal data.
|
| They share it, they just don't share your data "with third
| parties for their own marketing purposes", no additional
| privacy guarantees.
|
| source: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/
| nulbyte wrote:
| None of that describes selling data to third parties. The
| third parties that might receive data as described in this
| section are vendors or partners, not customers. Apple isn't
| making money off the sale of data here.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Apple isn't making money off the sale of data here.
|
| There's zero mention of that in the aforementioned policy.
| This policy completely allows them to make money in their
| deals with their <<partners>> or even their <<service
| providers>> and you wouldn't know it.
|
| For instance, Apple pay is a payment service and I would be
| really surprised if they didn't get paid by their partner
| for every transaction made through them. (And yes, a
| transaction is <<personal data>>).
|
| And since they are a for profit company, they obviously
| intend to make money (even if it's not through their
| partner paying them directly but through indirect revenue
| sources like customer retention or acquisition) when making
| partnership, because otherwise they wouldn't make such
| partnerships!
| readams wrote:
| Google and Facebook also don't sell data. They keep the
| data and charge advertisers to take advantage of their
| ability to target using the data.
| [deleted]
| techrat wrote:
| How does having a default web search engine equate to
| "[Company] is sending *all* search traffic to [other company]"?
|
| Users have preferences and may change the engines they search
| with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.
| blocked_again wrote:
| >Users have preferences and may change the engines they
| search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google
| anyway.
|
| Well Google ofcourse clearly diasgree given they are willing
| to pay 15 billion dollars.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| 95 % of users never touch predefined settings, so being the
| default almost always equates to being the "winner".
|
| What they should do instead is to let people select a search
| engine based on different criteria (including privacy
| friendliness). Most people would then still choose Google but
| the effect would be way less pronounced.
| bko wrote:
| Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.
|
| The only thing pointing people to DDG or some inferior
| search engine would be to frustrate non-technical people
| when their search results become "weird".
|
| Not all search engines are the same. I use DDG by default
| but I admit there is a huge difference between the two
| search engines and I use !g more than I'd like to admit.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| >Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.
|
| The 95% statistic only works when you introduce new,
| hidden option. People used Chrome/Firefox/whatever before
| Edge, they are used to it, and it's their default.
| ajkdhcb2 wrote:
| Some people will use it just because it's the default. Apple
| is paid because of that. So Apple is selling user data, i.e.
| violating privacy for money
| techrat wrote:
| some =/= all,
|
| which is the point I was addressing in my original comment.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Like, Apple does not sell user data to third parties and Apple
| is sending all search traffic to Google by default for $15B a
| year."
|
| Or like, Mozilla is working to protect user privacy^1 and
| Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default for
| [much less than $15B] a year.
|
| In each case, we can see two conflicting interests/objectives.
| Data collection versus privacy protection. Being honest, which
| is the one we can say is making the most progress at the
| expense of the other. How much data is being collected. How
| much data is off-limits. How much money is being "lost" by
| "tech" companies to privacy protection (user self-
| determination). Be honest.
|
| 1 And other noble causes, including maintaining a "healhty"
| web. Read: Ensuring online advertising does not die out.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| I'm sure it's net positive for users in both cases.
|
| Apple doesn't sell Google data of users' actions on other
| websites or in other apps.
|
| And Mozilla really did a lot for user privacy using that
| Google money.
| tyingq wrote:
| >Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default
| for...much less
|
| And not just much less overall...
|
| Mozilla is supposedly getting ~$400M/year. Which is $115M per
| percentage point of marketshare. The $15B for Apple is $804M
| per percentage point of marketshare.
|
| Which I suppose makes sense, as iPhone users probably
| automatically fall into a high income demographic.
|
| What I used for market share:
| https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Even if a user pivots from Safari, keeping Google as the
| default is keeping it as the default in the minds of users
| as they move to a different browser.
| julienfr112 wrote:
| I really don't understand what would be the threat from Apple to
| Google if they don't pay. Build their own search engine as they
| did for google maps ? Send users to Bing ? Mac users would not be
| thrilled ...
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Yes, the first line item you mention is rumored to be true.
| Apple has been apparently working on a search engine. Given
| their desire to subtly influence social mores while bowing out
| of true progressive change (beyond LGBTQ+ lip service and
| pretending to adopt diversity policies), while manifesting
| total inability to move past their puritanical fear of adult
| content or basically anything outside the superficial normie
| sphere of influence, I doubt it will be nuanced or have enough
| of a "wow factor" to be any better than AltaVista circa 1998 or
| to scoop up any following. Lol Siri can't even perform
| contextually relevant suggestive searches or respond in kind
| back with cues after giving a static response to a query. To
| think they have the bargaining power to compete with Google is
| silly, but it shows how Google just wants to throw money at
| this market (iOS devices) and fears the potential for a
| competitor to actually release a competing product.
|
| Think different (tm) *
|
| * unless the think is too different
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > Lol Siri can't even perform contextually relevant
| suggestive searches or respond in kind back with cues after
| giving a static response to a query
|
| Siri doesn't know a thing about you, that's why you get
| "static responses".
|
| Unlike Google, which uploads _everything_ to the cloud, most
| (if not all) of Apple's AI/Location/data mining stuff happens
| "on device", and it stays on that device. If you buy a new
| phone/tablet/computer, you're starting from scratch again,
| relearning frequent locations, charging habits, etc. The data
| isn't even backed up, so restoring your phone from a backup
| also means starting from scratch.
|
| With iOS 15, Siri is also moving "on device", so i guess it
| has the means to become smarter (personalized) now, when it
| can actually do (on device) data mining. Still not backed up
| though, so new phone still means you start over.
| oblio wrote:
| Why don't they move the data from device to device?
| siva7 wrote:
| Google isn't the company that throws 18B at a problem if it
| doesn't believe that not doing so wouldn't pose a substantial
| business risk.
| yftsui wrote:
| Google need Apple user's click stream data to rank the search
| results?
| marvel_boy wrote:
| Losing $15B suddenly is indeed a massive threat. Apple shares
| would be bearish next day.
| siva7 wrote:
| So would Google's share if they lost overnight the exclusive
| status of being the primary search engine, even more so than
| Apple.
| Jyaif wrote:
| Switching from one search engine to a strictly inferior one
| will be a hard sell to customers, but going from one search
| engine to a superior one privacy wise but inferior one results
| wise is justifiable.
|
| So they could send users to Bing, but I think it's more likely
| they'll send users to an Apple-branded frontend to Bing (or
| some other "privacy-first" frontend to an existing search
| engine).
| ksec wrote:
| Would most user even realise they are on a different search
| engine? Or would they care about it enough when majority of it
| are now coming from Siri Search.
|
| And if Apple partner with Bing and make an Apple's branded
| search engine ( like Yahoo ) while Bing _pays_ ~$5B+ to Apple?
| Would user notice the results were slightly worse?
|
| And Google lose 20% of user search traffic, and these 20% user
| base also happens to generate 30%+ of Ads revenue. i.e They are
| worth a bit more than others.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| Safari already comes with DuckDuckGo as a suggested search
| engine, and all it takes is Apple flipping a switch for users
| that use the default search engine, and most of that traffic
| would go to DDG instead of Google.
|
| Many Apple users are pragmatic, and don't care as long the
| search engine returns the results they want.
|
| I've been using DDG for years, and it could be DDG has gotten
| better, or Google has gotten worse, but where i've occasionally
| had to do a "!g whatever" search to get google results because
| DDG made no sense, i actually often get better results with DDG
| these days.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It could be that you've adapted your search style to DDG as
| well. I tried making the switch, and my god was it
| frustrating.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| I'm having the same experience as GP. I haven't changed my
| search style since the early 2000s, and Google search seems
| basically unusable for me at this point.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I doubt 90% of people even have a search style. They are
| just searching to get to a brand's website they might not
| know the exact spelling for. Or searching for a product
| sold by a limited amount of retailers.
| bambax wrote:
| Yes I don't understand it either. There is zero serious
| competition to Google, so it would be a very hard sell for
| Apple to switch their users to a worse search engine.
|
| The fact that Google is still unparalleled is also a mystery:
| why can't Bing be good? Why can't Amazon, or Apple with all
| their money, replicate the Google experience? This is weird.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Building a decent search engine requires query/clickstream
| data.
|
| Google has more, so Google is better. Simple.
| mcphage wrote:
| I don't know if I believe that. It sounds too similar to:
| "Building a decent search engine requires index data.
| Altavista has a bigger index, so Altavista is better.
| Simple."
| chrjxnandns wrote:
| Building a good search engine requires 3 things:
|
| 1) A large index 2) Clickstream data 3) Distribution
|
| It's a circular scaling product, as #3 increases it
| increases #2 which in turn improves results and leads to
| more #3.
|
| Google is buying distribution here which keeps their
| competitors from getting the valuable clickstream data
| that can improve their product. Thus they are reinforcing
| the idea that their product is the "best" while
| simultaneously preventing any competitor from matching
| them.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Well that was true once. But people have higher standards
| for search engines now that they don't want to go through
| every result by hand, and therefore the main thing
| they're after is the ranking algorithm not the search
| algorithm.
| mcphage wrote:
| Right, and maybe for the next generation of search
| engines it'll be something else again. Having the most
| query/clickstream data is what counts now, but there's no
| guarantee it will always count the most.
| Gunax wrote:
| That is a shocking amount. Consider that google purchased YouTube
| for less than 2 billion.
|
| And while I know YouTube wasnt the behemoth then, I find it hard
| to believe that it is only worth 1 month of google being the
| default.
|
| And only for macintosh users! And only macintosh users who use
| safari! And only macintosh users who use safari who don't change
| the default search engine!
|
| I am curious what that amounts to per user per year.
| nikanj wrote:
| That was in 2006. Back then a billion dollars was a lot of
| money, nowadays it's pre-launch valuation for a startup that
| has at least one MIT dropoff.
| konschubert wrote:
| That made me chuckle.
| manarth wrote:
| "And only for macintosh users! And only macintosh users
| who use safari! And only macintosh users who use safari
| who don't change the default search engine!"
|
| Rather more users than that:
|
| > to ensure that it remains the default search engine on
| _iPhone, iPad_ , and Mac
| arcticbull wrote:
| Indeed the Mac is a rounding error at Apple.
|
| > Back in January of this year, Apple confirmed there were
| 1.65 billion active Apple devices at the time, with iPhone
| alone accounting for one billion.
|
| They're only selling 5-6m Macs per quarter. [2] They sold 90m
| iPhones in Q4 of 2020. Extrapolating from this, _roughly_
| speaking, that would mean of the 1.65B Apple devices, 100m
| are Macs.
|
| [1] https://screenrant.com/android-vs-apple-active-devices-
| globa...
|
| [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-
| apple-ma...
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Consider that google purchased YouTube for less than 2
| billion
|
| That was a long time ago (15 years ago IIRC).
|
| And back then, YT was: a) much smaller than
| today b) certainly not a sure bet moneymaker c)
| a huge infrastructure (especially B/W) money sink
|
| I don't think you are comparing things that are comparable.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Apple is a media company that sells hardware, they don't need to
| spend time figuring out and maintaining search, especially if
| they've convinced Google to pay them that amount for the
| privilege.
| refurb wrote:
| I actually find this fascinating as it puts a dollar figure on
| it.
|
| It's similar to the FDA priority voucher market. If you get a
| drug approved by the FDA for a neglected disease, you get a
| transferable voucher that gets you a priority FDA review for
| whatever drug you use it for. It might accelerate approval by 3-6
| months.
|
| What's that worth? Well the vouchers have sold for $100-250M
| lately.
|
| https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/sanofi-nets-valuable-fda...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Well the vouchers have sold for $100-250M lately.
|
| Not to dismiss what you are saying, but "I can get regulatory
| approval for my drug faster" seems like it got far more
| valuable in the past, I dunno, 20-21 months or so.
| refurb wrote:
| If you're referring to Covid vaccines I'm not sure the
| vouchers would have made much difference. The FDA moved as
| fast as possible.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The COVID vaccines took priority over everything (rightly
| so). But that meant that the FDA had less time to approve
| anything else, so priority still became more valuable.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| People who say "they can just build their own search engine"
| should try Apple Maps.
|
| Yeah, it's not bad, but from my 18 months in Google Maps, I know
| there's a _very_ long tail you have to get through. They have
| huge teams working on problems so small you wouldn 't even
| realize they were problems.
|
| The first 90% of maps (or search) is easy. It's the 2nd and 3rd
| and 10th 90% that sucks up all the time.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Am I crazy or are the people saying that getting the headline
| mixed up? Google is the one paying Apple fifteen billion
| dollars here, not the other way around. Why would Apple want
| off that gravy train? I'm sure they could make some search
| engine, but they'd have to be better than Google at monetizing
| it for it to be worth the effort.
| qeternity wrote:
| I think the argument goes: Google is paying a massive $15B
| (or ca. 15% of Apple's profits) AND they are only doing that
| because there is more than $15B in value to them.
|
| So if default iOS search has value in excess of $15B, Apple
| should just build their own and capture all of that value.
|
| It's not an argument I agree with, and not one I think they
| will pursue.
| nevermindiguess wrote:
| If your employer is paying you 250k a year you shod
| definitely build something like this business and capture
| all that value!)
| MR4D wrote:
| Apple's P/E ratio is roughly 29. So, if you assume that the
| $15bn is pretty much all profit (for simplicity here
| remember), then the value of that for AAPL is roughly $35bn
| in market cap.
|
| So it takes a _really_ good reason to kick out Google from
| this situation.
| qeternity wrote:
| > Apple's P/E ratio is roughly 29. So, if you assume that
| the $15bn is pretty much all profit (for simplicity here
| remember), then the value of that for AAPL is roughly
| $35bn in market cap.
|
| Not sure where you get $35B from. 15B * 29 = $435B
| vineyardmike wrote:
| > So it takes a really good reason to kick out Google
| from this situation.
|
| Yes. The argument is that google makes more than 15b off
| that position, so the income has to be worth it _by
| definition_.
|
| Of course, apple won't likely monetize it as well, so
| it'll be hard to justify that.
| jacobolus wrote:
| > _People who say "they can just build their own search engine"
| should try Apple Maps._
|
| ... to be validated by concrete demonstration that Apple is
| capable of building an excellent service if they put their mind
| to it...
| mhh__ wrote:
| Excellent? It works but Google are pretty obviously the top
| dog here
| mminer237 wrote:
| I know it was trash when it came out, but Apple Maps
| surprisingly seems to often find significantly shorter
| routes than Google. Google Maps always tells me to go to
| the nearest interstate while Apple Maps seems better at
| recognizing if a local highway is actually faster.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have to double check the routing on both to make sure
| they are not making me go through 20 traffic lights to
| have a 10% probability of saving 45 seconds and 90%
| probability of wasting 2 min.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Is this true? Apple Maps came out with a feature a couple
| years ago where it knows which intersections are stop
| lights v.s. stop signs v.s. uncontrolled side streets.
| Rather than saying "in 1000 feet turn left", they say "at
| the light, turn left". As opposed to "go past this light,
| then turn left," or "at the stop sign, turn left. Then,
| turn right onto <street name>." If you glance at the screen
| while this is happening, the upcoming intersections
| helpfully have the appropriate stoplight/stopsign/etc
| graphic on them. They've found a way to communicate
| instructions such that you never have to worry about lane
| positioning, or not being ready for the next turn.
|
| Mind you, I juggle between Apple Maps and Google Maps _on
| an iphone_ , so maybe Google's features are different on
| Android. But this was the feature that finally got me using
| Apple Maps by default, and last I checked Google still
| hasn't implemented anything comparable on Apple.
| Drew_ wrote:
| Google Maps does a similar thing with POI's like
| Starbucks or gas stations.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| I always struggled with that. Way easier to visually
| identify a landmark that's _on the road_ than adjacent to
| it, IMO.
| robben1234 wrote:
| Using Apple Maps in the few spots they actually care to
| fully support, and using Apple Maps anywhere else in the
| world is a very different experience.
|
| While Google is able to deliver more or less the same
| product almost anywhere.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| Google and Apple have been playing cat and mouse with
| their map data for a while now, with Google's newest
| version only existing in four cities: London, New York,
| San Francisco, and Tokyo.
|
| Are those the only cities Google cares to fully support,
| or does creating new and more detailed map data take a
| while to roll out?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't doubt that it's usable in the areas where Apple cares
| to make it so.
|
| But as the comments make clear, it's all about the number of
| 9s in the reliability. If they're 99.9% reliable, that means
| 1 out of 1000 data points are wrong. You will definitely hit
| a wrong one. If it's 99.9999%, then it's 1 out of 1,000,000.
| You might not. Adding those last few 9s are _incredibly_
| costly.
| tracedddd wrote:
| I find Apple Maps totally fine and basically on par with Google
| maps today. It was indeed trash when it came out but I use it
| exclusively now and haven't had any issues in a couple years.
| My one gripe is the deep Yelp integration.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| Where do you live?
| fuckcensorship wrote:
| Apple is taking steps to move away from Yelp:
|
| https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/22/apple-maps-ratings-
| plac...
| DantesKite wrote:
| Thank goodness.
| lowkey_ wrote:
| I think the biggest issue with Apple building a search engine
| is that it doesn't fit their brand and product suite.
|
| Building a search engine comparable to Google requires
| utilizing tons of data and personalization in a way that Apple
| has never been comfortable with.
|
| Apple is the company I pay more for and trust with privacy and
| not needing to spy on me for the sake of giving me personalized
| ads, while Google is the exact opposite.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Another relevant point to consider is "is that 10% worth it?".
| The answer is absolutely yes - trust in a maps app is critical.
| dcormier wrote:
| It's out of date, but still an interesting read:
| https://www.justinobeirne.com/google-maps-moat
| spike021 wrote:
| I don't think this is an entirely apt comparison.
|
| You actually mention that even Google Maps has problems. I live
| in the Bay Area and have constantly experienced problems with
| it, including it directing me to a block or two behind the
| actual destination, directing me to more congested routes, etc.
|
| I think when Apple Maps first launched it definitely was not
| good at all, but at this point they're roughly the same.
| Neither are perfect and that's fine, but comparing them as
| being drastically different levels of quality seems a bit far-
| fetched, to me at least.
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| Google Maps may have problems, but Apple Maps still has
| _problems_. Apple Maps still regularly takes me down roads
| closed for months, and has huge omissions in the business
| data set. One glaring example of the feature gap is apple
| maps on desktop versus google maps.
|
| I don't think Apple Maps is bad, btw, and i think it's very
| good that they're trying to nip at Google's heels. But it's
| not even close.
| sswezey wrote:
| A great example: in Austin, most surface roads' speed
| limits were reduced by 5mph a year ago. Apple has yet to
| update these in their maps, despite one of their offices
| being just outside the city.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Apple Maps is on desktop, do you mean on web? Either way,
| try searching on DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dire
| ctions+new+york+to+los+angeles...
| trangus_1985 wrote:
| I guess I meant desktop web vs mobile web. And yeah,
| that's how I use it, through DDG. It's visually low
| density (in a bad way), and satellite view is terribly
| slow. Among other things. But I do appreciate that
| they're trying - Google shouldn't own maps
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| >> _The first 90% of maps (or search) is easy. It 's the 2nd
| and 3rd and 10th 90% that sucks up all the time._
|
| OK, let's look at it differently: was Apple smart to do Maps or
| not? Think of pros and cons and we know money means nothing.
| Apple has so much money they can spend $20 Billion in a quarter
| on it/them if they wanted.
|
| They could do the same with a "good enough" SE and then let the
| heavy users set Google as default. Did they lose any users from
| Apple Maps?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Apple plays with lots of money and lots of time. They're
| definitely okay taking a decade and tons of $$$ to catch up
| to where Google is.
| TheMightyLlama wrote:
| I find it interesting that the value of the ~18% of market share
| is $15B to google. I'm sure there's a further breakdown to
| ascertain the value of a single user.
| cma wrote:
| Presumably Apple gets some value from not going with Bing, and
| the price may meet in the middle to an extent.
| zahma wrote:
| And that about sums up the argument why Apple isn't really
| serious about privacy. Your data is always up for sale if someone
| bids high enough. And $15 billion is easy to part with when
| Google considers Apple's market share, especially for mobile
| phones and all the delicious location data they emit.
| rusk wrote:
| Remember when Apple had to pay google ... ios7 Apple Maps saga.
| aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA wrote:
| Does this imply that there's another search engine company
| willing to pay Apple $14B? Who's that? (Microsoft, I guess?)
| ksec wrote:
| >Now, a new report from analysts at Bernstein suggests that the
| payment from Google to Apple may reach $15 billion in 2021, up
| from $10 billion in 2020.
|
| >Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi says that Google is likely
| "paying to ensure Microsoft doesn't outbid it."
|
| The numbers just dont make any sense, both from Google's Traffic
| acquisition cost and Apple services revenue. And I know both
| number fairly well.
|
| I sometimes wonder if I could apply to be an analyst considering
| most, at least most of them ever came into mainstream media tends
| to be so wrong on tech.
| upcode wrote:
| Could you elaborate what number would make sense?
| ksec wrote:
| The total payment to Apple is roughly inlined with Apple's
| growth on total active devices using Google. i.e Devices
| excluding China. [0] So every two to three years you will
| read how Google is paying more to Apple. Except Active
| Devices hasn't grown much at all. Google is effectively
| paying 50% premium to Apple to outbid a _hypothetical_
| Microsoft bid.
|
| CPA Cost per acquisition are already lower for Bing, and
| Microsoft is running with lower margin. Traffic acquisition
| costs for Google has been steady. And if it is a dramatic 50%
| increase, I am pretty sure there will be some words on it in
| their Quarterly Report.
|
| In the past if this was coming from those usual suspect of
| Apple's PR site, you can instantly tell it is Apple's
| propaganda machine in the work. And this isn't the first time
| [1] they are doing it to put pressure on both companies
| either. But this time it is coming from "analyst".
|
| To put $15B into perspective Google will be paying 10% of
| their annual revenue to Apple.
|
| There is a possibility that Apple is trying to recope a
| potential lost of App Store revenue which is included in the
| same services category as the search deal.
|
| [0] I actually believe it is closer to active _user_ than
| active devices. Since a single user could have two or more
| Apple devices. But active devices is the only figure that
| Apple publish so we use that to keep things simple.
|
| [1] https://searchengineland.com/report-google-apple-safari-
| sear...
| onetimemanytime wrote:
| Shouldn't this be illegal? Google already has a huge market share
| yet they using profits to keep /expand market share.
| spookyuser wrote:
| Can't wait to read https://twitter.com/techemails in 10 years
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| Apple needs to invest heavily in DDG and make that the default.
| But then, they'd probably Dark Sky it.
| lallysingh wrote:
| Isn't DDG just a bing api client?
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| No.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for
| its default search engine. But I don't think its outlandish at
| all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as
| the default here. In practice I suspect this is really just
| google paying apple $15B not to compete with its golden goose.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Apple did switch to Bing at one point. The default search
| engine in Safari is likely just a matter of money to them.
|
| Apple already competes with Google in some search verticals,
| for example if you ask Siri to find a pizza restaurant, you
| will get an iOS pop-up with results that link to Yelp for
| reviews and Apple Maps for directions.
|
| I don't see Apple competing directly against Google in general-
| purpose search. But I could definitely see them expanding what
| iOS does "natively" to include Siri handling more queries
| itself rather than punting out to Google results.
| Spivak wrote:
| Which is honestly super annoying on iOS Safari because if you
| want to highlight and search for something on a page you have
| to go to the lookup screen, which will almost always be
| empty, and then click the web search button.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| do they have a deal with yelp? i wish i could swap out
| tripadvisor as the default for maps results
| brundolf wrote:
| I wouldn't mind it if it didn't force me to install the
| Yelp app to see more details/photos. They must have some
| kind of deal.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Apple is rolling out their own reviews system so I expect
| Yelp and the other sources to be phased out in the coming
| years.
| brundolf wrote:
| I dearly hope so. It's the only thing I don't like about
| Apple Maps.
| reaperducer wrote:
| It seems to be at least partially content-related, because
| I've seen both Yelp and TripAdvisor in Apple Maps.
| coryfklein wrote:
| Well Apple isn't exactly known for giving things away for
| free, so putting Yelp as the top-tier result in Apple Maps
| is a pretty good indicator that a deal was made.
| loceng wrote:
| And it's additional $15B R&D fund for Apple to improve its own
| search system that I can't imagine it's been developing for
| many years now behind the scenes.
| 1024core wrote:
| > I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls
| its own search engine
|
| IMHO, that's the play behind Neeva[1], to be acquired by Apple.
| But will Apple give up the sweet, sweet $$$$$ it gets from
| Google, just to roll its own?
|
| [1] https://www.neeva.com/
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Destroying Google dominance in search market will thoroughly
| damage the company, reducing it to a husk of its former self.
| This would enormously weaken Apple competitor, strongly
| improving its market power. It's most definitely worth to
| Apple more than $15B/year, as long as they can pull it off,
| and can avoid antitrust.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I wish Apple would roll their own- free of ads. But hey- $15B
| is a lot of money.
| draw_down wrote:
| If Apple is smart (maybe they are, maybe they aren't) they'd
| roll that money straight into developing maps and other
| services to lessen their devices' reliance on Google.
| todd3834 wrote:
| Didn't this already happen at one point? At least for Siri
| results I know it did. I feel like it happened on Safari too
| but it might just have been Siri results.
|
| [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-
| aw...
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| I remember this! You'd ask Siri to search for something, and
| you'd get back Bing results. I thought it was odd because I
| had never (at the time) used Bing for anything at all.
|
| That said, I haven't used an iOS device in some time, and
| didn't know if that ever changed to Google or another
| service(Siri search results).
| justapassenger wrote:
| Apple understands and knows how to build customer devices and
| products. They have no understanding of web and infrastructure.
| Building search engine is way beyond their competency as an
| organization.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing
| CPUs. It is a matter of brute work basically, an army of
| programmers. CPU design is a lot more sophisticated.
| omegalulw wrote:
| Not really. The vast majority of CPU design is just logic
| in Verilog/VHDL, similar to software.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Building a search engine is mundane compared to
| developing CPUs
|
| Not for Apple - they have hardware excellence in their DNA,
| but the web and internet services aren't a core competency
| (yet?). They have made huge strides from the disaster that
| was MobileMe, but they are nowhere close to where the Bing
| or Google search teams are.
| wedn3sday wrote:
| > hardware excellence in their DNA
|
| Yes, thats why my $4000 macbook pro keyboard inserts
| double keys strokes on 50% of key presses. The excellence
| must all be in the magic touchbar that periodically stops
| working so I cant even use vim because the ESC key is on
| a broken touch screen.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Apple has so much money that they can be whatever they want
| to be. Didn't they say they have around $200B of cash on hand
| earlier this year?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| [1] says $204B around April time, yep.
|
| [1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-
| funds/sectors/sp500-every...
| lucasmullens wrote:
| I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.
| gm3dmo wrote:
| That would be very cuil.
| shagie wrote:
| ... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of
| cloud compute to be able to host it.
|
| I mean, sure they _could_ , but what would that expense
| gain them in terms customer experience?
|
| Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple,
| there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to
| expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense
| gain?
|
| Giant piles of money
|
| > in terms customer experience?
|
| This being the top concern doesn't really mesh with the
| game theory of google giving them $15B. If everyone
| believed UX was apple's primary concern, and that google
| was the best option, then google would not have to pay.
| shagie wrote:
| Unless it makes _more_ than 15B for Apple in terms of
| being able to do something with their own search
| (advertising?), it is a loss.
|
| Google is paying for Apple to not have the default be
| Google search. If Google wasn't paying, Apple would be
| able to offer the default search provider to someone else
| or make it a user selectable choice in the new phone
| setup.
|
| Google is paying to keep Apple from thinking about their
| own provider or shifting the default to Bing.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/297137/mobile-share-
| of-u...
|
| Organic search from a mobile device is 60% of all Google
| searches. If we take the 50/50 breakdown for iOS vs
| Android and apply it there, 1/3rd of all google searches
| are from iOS.
|
| That's what Google is paying for - making sure that
| people who don't care about their search provider
| continue to make up 1/3 of all of their searches (and
| data gathering).
|
| The next thing to consider back on that "what would the
| expense gain" ... does Apple have the resources to spin
| up a 1/3 google data center. I mean, yea they do... but
| that's _expensive_ and if they aren 't selling adds, it
| is purely an expense.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Google search sucks nowadays anyway comapared to 20 years
| ago.
| artiszt wrote:
| right. it does. besides, Google paid since initial release
| of Safari when Cupertino had decided what the final
| design/functions of Safari were going to be -- seems many
| forgot about that as well as where and when Goo blunt and
| boldly went headhunting for new staff and peeps in p2p
| underground in the days Carracho was about to become --
| very briefly -- a much fancied p2p-client
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Apple could buy duckduckgo to go along/try to regain their
| privacy branding. Yea, duckduckgo has a lot of work to do to
| get to google level(afaik they're just a bing skin atm), but
| it'd be a decent start.
| Crash0v3rid3 wrote:
| I doubt they would want to buy a search engine that heavily
| relies on Bing.
| simonh wrote:
| They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music
| industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them
| learning about them and eventually dominating.
|
| I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one.
| They have built a position on customer privacy and moving
| into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take
| Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.
| justapassenger wrote:
| It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the
| world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all
| the money in the world, and yet their online services suck.
|
| Those are very different worlds, that require organizations
| built in very different way.
| baxuz wrote:
| They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud
| storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.
| simonh wrote:
| That's fair, fortunately those don't matter as much.
| zahma wrote:
| It doesn't have to be by default. Like many other preferences
| Apple asks when it pushes a new version of iOS or macOS, why
| couldn't this be a choice for users?
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing
| for its default search engine.
|
| For a long time Siri searches were powered by Bing.
| qeternity wrote:
| > But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple
| rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here
|
| I think this is even more outlandish than switching to Bing.
|
| Google Search accounted for $100B in revenues. iOS has ca. 14%
| browser market share. Assuming that mobile users search as much
| or are as valuable as desktop searchers, then that suggests iOS
| users generate ca. $14B in revenue. Of course, it's likely iOS
| users are more valuable than the average Google user, but it
| gives a rough run of the numbers.
|
| Google is happy to pay all of this revenue back to Apple so
| that they don't suffer indirectly in other parts of the
| business by having an Apple competitor or with Bing as default.
|
| Apple on the other hand needs to generate this value from a
| standing start. It's difficult to see how they'd feasibly get
| to > $15B net monetization on such a massive and risky
| undertaking.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| I really think you underestimate how hard it is to "roll a
| search engine" the size of Google or Bing. Even a company like
| Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years,
| regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.
| bertil wrote:
| I remember recent conversations (in June) about search
| engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_
| DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to "tank man" (not the
| imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese
| Communist Party had something to do with it). That
| highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might
| have delegate or contract some aspects of it.
|
| It's not like Apple to not control everything, but they could
| do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.
| nicce wrote:
| Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to
| show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on
| top of that, but is based on Bing.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| That's just not true.
|
| the CEO of DDG has said numerous times that it's not
| based on bing, and y'all just love repeating these wild
| ass rumors for literally no reason.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Even a company like Apple couldn 't do it in anything
| under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they
| throw at the problem._
|
| Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for
| Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make
| improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight.
|
| https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683
|
| You can safely assume that for any critical external
| dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.
| eitland wrote:
| Google managed it 20 years ago.
|
| Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute
| capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space.
| (Estimating from Moores law.)
|
| Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the
| last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a
| technical perspective.
| holografix wrote:
| No offence but I think you're wrong. Apple could buy Duck
| Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it
| good enough or do the first search on the default search
| engine.
| foo__-bar wrote:
| Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck
| Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by
| market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To
| be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names
| HEmanZ wrote:
| I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I
| would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search
| engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing
| and Google's search engines and now work on a third very
| large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really
| aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing,
| and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would
| believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple.
|
| They could buy another search engine, but again getting
| Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still
| honestly a massive project.
|
| I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as
| well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that
| the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to
| Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep
| taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on
| other things.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| > and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search
| engine.
|
| I'm curious, can you share which one?
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one)
| but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially
| compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for
| a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with
| the results and try the query on Google, it's no better
| there.
| google234123 wrote:
| Are you sure you don't have predisposition to that
| conclusion?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal
| directly with Microsoft? It's not like Microsoft won't know
| Apple bought Duck when it's time to renew the contract
| anyways.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search
| engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time
| sounds like a massive win to me.
|
| I think with billions of dollars in funding they could
| accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally.
| They don't need to be as good as google.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies
| on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware.
|
| Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your
| customers find your software inferior.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Safari would be evidence against this.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?
| pcurve wrote:
| A valid point, but I wonder how effective Apple's search engine
| will be with their stance on user privacy. I'm sure Apple is
| perfectly content with letting Google do the dirty work.
|
| I don't think there's risk of apple building a successful
| search engine that can compete with Google, but just paying for
| Mac users who are not savvy enough to change their default
| browser to Google. (or bribe against going with Duck.com)
| not_math wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they
| don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the
| launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier
| and better for them to accept the $15B.
| breakfastduck wrote:
| I tried to switch to using DuckDuckGo and found it
| basically unusable. Essentially the same quality as Bing.
| Maybe slightly better, but not by much.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That's because DuckDuckGo is essentially a reskin of Bing
| search. They don't do their own indexing save for a few
| token websites.
| nicce wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.
| YPPH wrote:
| >DuckDuckGo is literally Bing
|
| How so?
| detaro wrote:
| In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I
| think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian
| queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the
| search results back and displays them. (adding its own
| quick results and ads)
| YPPH wrote:
| Oh, I see. Thanks.
| selykg wrote:
| I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help
| page:
|
| https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
|
| They have their own crawler as well, and there are a
| bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching
| for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the
| end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding
| to.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| That page is intentionally misleading. They list crawled
| websites as 'sources'.
|
| If DuckDuckGo claims to have over hundreds sources, then
| Bing and Google have over _billions_ of sources by the
| same definition.
| detaro wrote:
| To me that page always reads as if it tries to play up
| their own contribution, which until there is more detail
| makes me suspicious if the main results are meaningfully
| influenced by them, or if it's "just" infoboxes etc.
| selykg wrote:
| Maybe, but I also think basically saying "well, it just
| spits out Bing results" is over simplifying. There's
| probably somewhere in the middle, as I said, I suspect
| Bing results are a pretty large chunk of it but I also
| try not to just hyperbolically state things ya know?
| detaro wrote:
| I don't believe "it's bing results with added extras
| around them" is hyperbolical, given how similar DDG and
| Bing results look everytime I try it. If it's wrong, DDG
| would IMHO do themselves a favor by sharing more details
| here.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I want a search engine that returns results solely on the
| terms of the query. I'm so tired of search engines thinking
| they know what I want to see based on my history. Not only do
| I question the validity of the results when they are so
| subject to change, I also worry I'm missing something.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| "Hey, Google, what can I use to replace white bean paste?"
| "Hoisin sauce is a great replacement for white bean sauce!"
|
| "Hey, Google, things have gone weird in macOS 12, how fix?"
| "MACOS 4 was RELEASEd in 1912 AWKWARDLy with A spanner"
|
| I get that search is a hard problem but they are
| spectacularly bad at it for being the best.
| [deleted]
| gigatexal wrote:
| Do we really think Apple will launch its own privacy protecting
| search engine if the opportunity cost is 15B and counting?
| djhworld wrote:
| I doubt many people change the default search engine on their
| device/browser, so it must be worth it for Google.
|
| Whenever I speak to my mother she refers to the web as "Google"
| because it's the entrypoint to everything she does online. She
| doesn't type URLs, she goes to websites by typing them into the
| Google search box and clicking through (often the top result
| which is usually an ad)
| larrik wrote:
| With the omnibox on chrome, firefox and mobile, this is pretty
| much everyone now, isn't it?
| shayankh wrote:
| but what other option does Apple have anyway other than Google?
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| What would Safari switch to if Google didn't pay?
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| DDG or Bing and some local options for eg Russia and China
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| You mean Apple would handle them $15B worth of value to
| Microsoft (or Yahoo? Isn't Bing just Yahoo reskinned with
| fancy wallpapers?) and Yandex for free? As for DDG, despite I
| myself like and use it, almost everyone whom I told said they
| are not satisfied with its search results. I doubt Apple is
| willing to harm their users satisfaction this way.
|
| I would rather expect them to go introduce a search engine of
| their own. The Runnaroo author has proven it is possible and
| not even hard even for a single developer to build their own
| search engine and beat Google in terms of quality and UX.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Lest we forget...
|
| August 6, 1997: In one of the most famous moments in Apple
| history, Steve Jobs reveals that Microsoft invested $150 million
| in its rival.
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/567497/microsoft-investment-saves-...
| mcphage wrote:
| I'm not sure what the relevance of this is?
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Yeah sorry I didn't explain it. I'm old enough to remember,
| but perhaps a lot of HN readers aren't.
|
| It's just that $15 billion may seem like a lot of money today
| to most people and even to most corporations, but for Apple
| and Google, it's a footnote.
|
| And yet, at one time in Steve Jobs' second tenure at Apple,
| just 1% of that quantum was the difference between Apple's
| survival and Apple's demise.
|
| Here's a better telling of the story that provides context
|
| https://www.wired.com/2009/08/dayintech-0806/
|
| and Walter Isaacson quoting how Jobs told it
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/03/01/steve-
| jo...
| yalogin wrote:
| I wonder how they arrive at this. Does google have any pull in
| this? What other options does Apple have at this point? No other
| search engine comes close to google and people are really used to
| google's UI and changing that will be very bad for the UX which
| Apple really cares about.
| chmaynard wrote:
| Presumably this compensation by Google is pure profit for Apple.
| If so, that might explain why Apple hasn't developed its own
| search engine.
| daniel_iversen wrote:
| I guess Apple devices are probably responsible for a decent
| amount of the consumer web browsing in the world (iOS has 25-30%
| mobile device market share). I wonder if Apple is still going to
| launch a full search engine[1] and that might actually change the
| game (Bing has less than 3% search market share and Apple might
| instantly get 30%!) - and they're indexing a bunch due to Siri
| and stuff anyway.
|
| [1]
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/barrycollins/2020/10/28/apple-b...
| augbot wrote:
| It would be nice to see Apple use some of that money to update
| Safari to be more modern. Food for thought..
| zyemuzu wrote:
| Search is dead.
| arein3 wrote:
| it's not that they will instantly switch to ddg or bing or yandex
| and provide inferior results
|
| it's that if google doesnt pay or tries to negociate too hard
| apple will know that revenue stream is not guaranteed anymore and
| might implement their own alternative
|
| some doubdt that a competitor could overtake google, but yandex
| has image search/facial recognition capabilities miles ahead of
| what google offers
| 256DEV wrote:
| Considering how big Apple is already ($80 billion per QUARTER!)
| the idea that they could at some point still decide to add a
| search engine and the associated revenues is amazing to me. It
| obviously wouldn't be a 1-to-1 switch with Google traffic coming
| from Apple devices but if they seriously attempted it I don't see
| how it wouldn't be a very substantial business very quickly.
|
| Presumably this payment is based on Google's evaluation of the
| search ad value attributed to Apple devices but only $3.75
| billion per quarter still seems low for how much iPhone search
| traffic there must be? Especially considering the relatively
| lower level of iPhone ad blocking vs. desktop I see anecdotally
| in my non-tech friends. I imagine though that both companies send
| in fairly deadly teams of apex negotiators for a deal like this
| so it must be close to representing the true economic value of
| the tie-up...
| WanderPanda wrote:
| I would also imagine that iPhone users are above average value
| for advertisers because of their spending behaviour.
| simonh wrote:
| Monetising mobile search would also require Apple to develop a
| very strong advertising platform. Doing that would put them in
| direct conflict with themselves over privacy, either they'd
| have to compromise privacy to benefit their ad business, or
| their ad business would be significantly less attractive to
| advertisers. In practice this would make it very hard for them
| to monetise search anywhere near as well as Google can, maybe 5
| to 1. So if mobile search is worth say $30bn to Google, it
| might be worth $6bn to Apple.
|
| Combined with the high costs of building both a search engine
| and an ad platform, and this would result in a massive revenue
| hit for Apple. I don't see how any vaguely realistic numbers
| lead to them benefiting from it, at least for quite a long
| time.
| gordon_gee1 wrote:
| They don't have to necessarily deeply monetize to be
| successful, apple could play dumb and offer ad results based
| on search terms only. DuckDuckGo does similar and I do wonder
| at scale what kind of revenue this could end up being. Google
| doesnt behave in an entirely pro-business way as well. Google
| ads are not market efficient at the moment, with competitors
| taking keywords that are company names for example, forcing
| businesses to spend to be the first option even if the user
| searches your business' exact name. Eliminating just a few
| insulting Google search behaviors and limiting data tracking
| could be a nice revenue stream
| londons_explore wrote:
| They have far far lower revenue per impression than
| strongly targeted ads using ML.
| gomox wrote:
| I find it interesting that you consider the mob-like
| behavior of Google forcing everyone to bid on their own
| name "not efficient". It seems to me like they are really
| efficient (at their goal of extracting tons of revenue from
| everyone and their dog).
| simonh wrote:
| Success means revenue of at least $15bn plus the cost of
| operating the search service and ad network. Anything less
| is a revenue hit.
| curiousmindz wrote:
| I think that Apple would only consider building their own
| search engine if they had the ability to generate (close to)
| these $15B per year in value.
|
| Since Apple wants to keep its privacy-friendly brand, these
| $15B would have to come from something other than ads; and I
| can't think of another realistic source of revenue. But who
| knows, the whole "vertical integration" aspect could unlock new
| scenarios...
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| You are suggesting that Apple wouldn't touch ads, but that's
| exactly what they did with IAd
| curiousmindz wrote:
| I can't find how much revenue Apple is generating from iAd,
| but all hints point to a fairly small number. I'm guessing
| that Apple keeps it around to "help" small app developers
| who build free apps.
|
| And more importantly, iAd seems to focus on advertising
| apps themselves (like a game ad inside another game). This
| is a far less intrusive model than a general-purpose search
| engine (where you find all kinds of advertisers).
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| iAd failed.
|
| They tried to launch premium ads...
|
| The launch definitely was not focused on "small
| developers" too.
|
| While keeping 40%, i don't think they were generous at
| for the "small companies" ;)
|
| So I really don't know how you can get to that
| conclusion.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
| ikerdanzel wrote:
| Apple at software is quite bad. For 10years+ their maps and
| majority of their toolings are weaker than the competitors.
| Starting their own search engine is just like starting their
| own ping that try to compete with FB back when Steve was
| still around. I think the next 10 years we will start to see
| Apple sputtering. Most of their revenue can be traced to
| Steve foresight 10 years ago. Apple now is mimicking others
| like trying to create car and streaming videos.
| knorker wrote:
| > if they seriously attempted it I don't see how it wouldn't be
| a very substantial business very quickly.
|
| I have a hard time parsing your first paragraph. Are you saying
| Apple could build its own search engine?
|
| Possibly it could. But it's not just about throwing money at
| it. Do you remember when Google didn't brag about how big a DC
| footprint they had? It was all hush hush.
|
| Microsoft struggled to bring up a search engine. They even
| licensed part of it. Some of the queries sent on live.com (as
| bing was called back then) were actually sent out to third
| party search providers.
|
| Then Microsoft started bragging about how they're able to
| operate just like Google, too.
|
| ... then Google turned on search-as-you-type, or whatever it
| was called. The one where you see search results after every
| keystroke (since removed, because it was kinda pointless). That
| feature was basically a big FU to Microsoft, saying "we can 10x
| our search traffic overnight. Can you?".
|
| Google reportedly stopped being secret about its capacity
| because the secrecy was there to prevent Microsoft truly
| understanding the scale needed to compete. Once they did
| understand, Google stopped being so secret.
|
| Apple is years behind. They don't have shovels in the ground.
| They don't operate services at this scale.
|
| Sure, they are not a small shop. But they outsource so many
| things in this space.
|
| Microsoft started from a much better position, but they still
| took years to not be a joke in this space.
|
| But yeah, with Apple building DCs, you should maybe expect them
| to have a reasonable replacement ready in 5-10 years, if they
| really put their mind to it.
|
| And then there's the ad side. It's not just the tech (where
| Google has a 20 year head start), but also the business deals
| (where again 20 years head start), the inertia of existing
| advertisers, and integration of search ads and display ads.
|
| But of course, with a closed ecosystem, and actually being the
| biggest private company in the world, they will absolutely get
| more monopoly accusations for integrating search, app store,
| and phone, than Google has.
|
| So no, you can actually throw billions and billions at this
| problem and still fail. It's not obvious to me that such an
| investment will have positive ROI for 10 years.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think the vast majority of people would not know the
| difference between a Google search and a DuckDuckGo search.
| They use search to shop the top few retailers or find the
| actual website of a company, but I doubt many are doing the
| deep dives that it might actually make a difference to use
| Google with.
|
| Google's moat right now is Maps, YouTube, and Drive apps, I
| think.
|
| Or at least that is my family's experience. Google search and
| gmail were easily replaced.
| knorker wrote:
| You're focusing on the quality of results, though. That I
| think is actually the easiest problem, to the point where I
| didn't even list it.
|
| Remember when Google+ launched, and Microsoft as a joke
| created a clone in a week or so? That was completely
| missing the point about what's hard.
|
| Or how "make a twitter clone" is basically the "hello
| world" of web apps. If it's just you and your friends on
| it, actually yes you can make a twitter clone that you can
| basically not tell the difference, and you can do that in a
| weekend (another weekend to make the app).
|
| To make a twitter clone for 10 people you can run it on
| your laptop. For 1000 people you buy a VM in some cloud.
| For a billion apple devices you need world wide pops, fibre
| deals, plots of land, construction companies, resource
| planning, legal teams, government contracts, etc...
|
| Again, Apple could possibly do this. But this is not their
| core skill. And do you know what happens when a company
| throws billions on not their core skill? Google+ happens.
| piyh wrote:
| Why couldn't they use AWS? They already do for iCloud.
| knorker wrote:
| Reportedly not just AWS:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/report-apple-
| is-g...
|
| Admittedly they don't have to vertically integrate, and
| they wouldn't pay list prices if they use any other
| cloud.
|
| But honestly, if the idea is to get off of Google search,
| what exactly is the gain by relying on a third party
| albeit at a lower level?
|
| You have to ask yourself: Is running a search engine the
| best thing that Apple could be doing with its time? Is
| the fact that they don't run their own search engine a
| danger to their core business?
|
| In the end it comes down to projected cost and income,
| and obviously I'm not in a position to calculate either
| one for Apple, not being in the room with their ruthless
| negotiators.
|
| But yeah, the starting point of dropping google is losing
| out on these $15B. So already that's what you have to
| work with. And then the cost of public cloud egress
| traffic, which is famously ridiculously expensive.
|
| Your comment seems a bit like "why don't they just...",
| which seems a bit naive when dealing with business at
| this scale.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to handle
| Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for technical
| reasons?
|
| I do not know enough about what goes into delivering
| people search results worldwide. I just know that my
| family's experience switching to DuckDuckGo has been
| seamless, but I also do not know how representative our
| search behavior is.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| DDG is just a frontend to bing's results
|
| Why would it be difficult to scale?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assumed it would not be difficult to scale. I was
| asking knorker why they thought it might not scale, as
| that is what I thought their comment implied.
| knorker wrote:
| > Are you suggesting DuckDuckGo would not be able to
| handle Apple switching the default to DuckDuckGo for
| technical reasons?
|
| Right, I think they would not. Not without A LOT of work,
| on all sides of the business.
|
| If you have a 1qps service, you can scale 100x[1] fairly
| easily. If you have 1kqps[2] then scaling that to 100kqps
| is a different beast alltogether. Every single design in
| load balancing decision, TCP termination, request
| routing, peering aggreements, geolocation, backend load
| balancing, and failover, can be assumed to be wrong.
|
| Or if not wrong, then at least untested and many parts
| will not survive first contact with the enemy.
|
| And that's just to get the SEARCH working at all.
|
| Remember, in order to replace Google's $15B you probably
| want some sort of revenue, too. And revenue of $15B+cost
| of service.
|
| So... ads?
|
| Google has buildings and buildings full of people doing
| nothing but ads. They have presence in pretty much every
| major city in the world. No, I'm not just talking about
| the engineering offices that are well known.
|
| To ask Apple to create a search engine is actually to ask
| them to create "A Google" (except Cloud).
|
| According to the latest earnings report Google spends
| about $160B and Search ads takes in about $120B. These
| numbers are not comparable, since they are different
| level line items. But it should be kept in mind that a
| very naive reading of this means that yes, Apple has
| $195B in the bank, but if they tried to "just create a
| Google" then they'd be broke in just over a year.
|
| Especially since it would be MUCH more expensive and
| risky to build this in one big shot, than to organically
| grow it at great profit over many years.
|
| Maybe better to get an earnings report from Google pre-
| cloud, when it was essentially an ads company by income
| and investment. Of course it won't be comparable unless
| Apple decides to also do an ad network. Which they
| probably would because if you have the tech and the
| customers, then it's free money.
|
| But you said technical reason. So let's scratch ads, and
| never mind the money. Yeah, they could be able to do
| that. It's not clear to me how much of their search index
| they actually own, though. They say they have a
| crawler[3], but it sure also reads like "we're just a
| frontend for Bing". Truth is probably somewhere in
| between.
|
| So what do you think MSFT would say if Apple started
| hammering Bing (albeit indirectly) for search results,
| sans ads? Or even with ads?
|
| So duckduckgo is good because they don't actually have
| their own index. Bing took _years_ to not be ridiculous
| (it 's good now). We saw Cuil completely fail, even full
| of ex-googlers.
|
| All this to say: Writing their own search engine is hard
| (see Bing, and how much MSFT plowed into that to make it
| work), and DDG can't just be used as a backend. And
| switching to DDG is just throwing $15B in the lake and
| giving it to someone else for free.
|
| [1] that's the order of magnitude difference between
| google and ddg according to
| https://www.wired.co.uk/article/duckduckgo-google-
| alternativ..., of course that doesn't take into account
| that this would only move apple traffic, but I like the
| round number.
|
| [2] 1.5B per month is about 578 per second, and with
| seasonality that it at least 1kqps at peak.
|
| [3] https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
| pages/results/so...
| gomox wrote:
| The deep dives don't work anymore on Google search. It's
| all content spam.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Then I am not sure what Google search is useful for. I
| personally have not needed to use it in a long time.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > I think the vast majority of people would not know the
| difference between a Google search and a DuckDuckGo search.
|
| One has a small static duck. The other has a colorful name
| that is usually replaced by pictures for a day. It's very
| obvious.
| marricks wrote:
| Substantial how? Apple doesn't sell ads and I'm pretty sure
| that antithetical to their business model, if they did their
| advantage in other ways (privacy which sucks anyways) would dry
| up.
| jsnell wrote:
| Apple build advertisement profiles on iOS users, and allow
| App Store and Apple News ads to be targeted using said
| profiles. They are estimated to sell billions of dollars of
| ads per year. Their tracking is, as far as I can tell, not
| opt in. Instead it's an opt-out hidden in an obscure settings
| menu, with the sign "beware of the Leopard" on the door.
|
| See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223
|
| So it absolutely isn't antithetical to their business model.
| The opposite: Apple's business model is to lock users to
| their platform, and extract rent out of as much of their
| economic activity as possible. If anything, third party
| advertisers making money from iOS users directly without
| giving Apple a cut is what's antithetical to Apple's business
| model.
|
| It seems basically guaranteed that within a couple of years
| Apple will be doing another attempt at launching an ad
| network for third party apps and/or web sites (Safari-only)
| using the same tracking data.
| gpt5 wrote:
| Apple does sell search ads. Search the App Store for almost
| anything...
| nojito wrote:
| They already do.
|
| If you're on iOS, swipe down and use that search bar.
| jstx1 wrote:
| Seems like a lot. I wonder how Google do the analysis to decide
| that it's worth it or how many people use search through Safari
| instead of Google's app.
| marstall wrote:
| if this was Apple's only income (somehow), what market cap would
| that translate to?
| programmer_dude wrote:
| If this is true, wow, the Apple walled garden is big! This
| answers a question I had: why do people care about the Neural
| hash thing so much?
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| If they pay 15billion, the revenue number must be astronomic,
| very curious to know the net revenue for this. It's valuable to
| Google anyway, as part of branding pr.
| TriStateFarmer wrote:
| Who uses search engines anymore?
|
| Most new data is on Facebook/Twitter/Discord etc. Shoppers search
| on Amazon. Video consumers search on YouTube.
|
| My point is that is must be *super easy* to build a search engine
| nowadays. You only need the best 10% of websites and you have got
| most of the quality content. Vast majority of websites are now
| irrelevant remains of the old internet.
|
| Most searches could be answered by their Siri system.
|
| Therefore Apple could build a functional search engine in months,
| and I guess they already have one ready to go for when it is
| needed.
| miohtama wrote:
| > Who uses search engines anymore?
|
| I do. It is a bas assumption to think all other, or even most
| of the other users, have similar usage habits as you are or are
| using the same services as you do, unless there are numbers to
| back the claims.
| janandonly wrote:
| DuckDuckGo is good and getting better while Google is mire
| bloated and irrelevant by the minute...
|
| So, Whenever I help a friend with their iDevice the first thing I
| do is change default searching to DDG.
|
| End game: Google stops paying Apple and Apple buys DDG.
| chimen wrote:
| You should feed your own ego a bit more and make their devices
| vote for Trump on next election because you seem to know better
| what they need. DDG is cool and usable but to go that far and
| change my family's or friends default SE with something else
| which is inferior, unexpected and uncalled for is just..rude to
| say the least. A tool is a tool and people should use the best
| there is otherwise you're just putting them on a competitive
| disadvantage in life since we use a SE for almost anything
| these days.
| thejackgoode wrote:
| I tried switching to DDG three times over last 6 years, and I
| always move back after I end up adding !g every second time
| when searching because the results are outrageously irrelevant.
| DDG does not understand me as Google does, bad or good thing it
| might be.
| troebr wrote:
| Even when DDG does well, very often I'll still add in a
| second search with !g in case Google has an even better
| result. Some searches have one answer (what's the population
| of Paris), whereas some searches have multiple answers and
| you want to pick the best result(s) (how to do x).
| redm wrote:
| I had the exact opposite result. I've been using DDG for
| about 2 years and I rarely use Google now.
| post_break wrote:
| You're like the human version of malwarebytes. Sure I'll fix
| your computer, but I'm going to change your default search
| engine, oh you don't mind this toolbar either do ya? Bonzi
| Buddy over here.
| josh_today wrote:
| I had to reread and confirm that it's $15B per _year_
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| For comparison, Google appears to be paying Mozilla about
| $400M/year. https://www.zdnet.com/article/sources-mozilla-
| extends-its-go...
| INTPenis wrote:
| Wow! You'd think with that kind of money they'd be able to fix
| 10 year old bugs in Firefox.
|
| What the hell is that money going towards?
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _What the hell is that money going towards?_
|
| Probably a really expensive dustpan for all the salt that
| people throw at them.
| rednerrus wrote:
| Company wide vacations.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Compare this payment to the statement of Google that
| "alternatives are just one click away" in the context of search
| engine competition.
|
| Pretty hard to square the notion that value delivered, not
| defaults and market power matter when you pay 15 billion for that
| one click
| lallysingh wrote:
| I think you're just seeing the value of being the first click.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| I don't understand how this is legal. Seems like blatantly
| anticompetitive behaviour. Isn't it still dumping if the price of
| your product is so low that it is negative?
| chrjxnandns wrote:
| So this is more than an entire year of revenue for Bing. How is
| it not anti-competitive that the dominant player spends an
| unattainable amount of money to keep their next biggest
| competitor out of the market?
| prvc wrote:
| The considerations that would inform such an agreement are far
| beyond my comprehension. I suppose we may draw the lesson from
| the presumptive wisdom of this decision that software defaults
| are very important (hobbyist developers take note!) and also that
| large figures ought to be nice, round numbers.
| quanto wrote:
| Could one do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on a user
| acquisition cost for Google?
|
| 15b USD/year / 500 m users = 30 USD/user/year
|
| 3 searches/user/day = 1000 searches/user/year
|
| 30 USD/user/year / 1000 searches/user/year = 0.03 USD/search
|
| AFAIK, 0.03 USD per search (or impression) is in the right
| ballpark for advertising.
|
| ------------------------
|
| Data used (retrieved from Google) 446m Safari users. An average
| user searches on Google 3 - 4 times per day.
| polote wrote:
| You have to include the cost of preventing competitors to get
| bigger. If Google loose its monopoly on search Google as a
| whole might collapse
| tyingq wrote:
| Might be skewed a bit by the fact that iPhone users are
| generally more affluent.
| jyu wrote:
| If only I could pay Google $30 / year to opt out of their data
| collection schemes.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I'm fairly sure a lot of folks would sign up at even
| $30/month, if any product managers are reading this.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I suspect that what people want with "No data collected" is
| too nebulous to be actionable, at $30/ month or any price.
| Youtube Premium is something actionable, "I don't want
| adverts". OK then, no adverts, done for the price.
|
| If you try to take it literally it blows up immediately.
| _Who_ aren 't we collecting data about? We can't very well
| have data like login credentials for a user we don't
| collect data about, so...
| Joeri wrote:
| Sort of reminds me how I can't get a digital newspaper
| without ads, regardless of what I'm willing to pay, or how
| every cable tv provider in my region has unskippable ads in
| on demand and (soon) recorded tv programs, regardless of
| what I pay. The content industries are very much stuck in a
| "content must be financed through advertising" mindset, and
| google seems trapped with them. I can easily imagine a paid
| privacy-first google premium service that strips out google
| ads across the internet, and I would pay for it, but
| apparently google's imagination is more limited. So now I
| just use ad blockers.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I would pay a lot more than 30
| nathancahill wrote:
| Give me back the advanced search operators and I'm in for 3
| figures/month.
| irjustin wrote:
| This would be an interesting product especially to those
| who are relatively price insensitive such as companies.
|
| One of the perks of working for us is a google no-ads
| subscription! could work?
| samsolomon wrote:
| Yeah, that's an average though. If you don't hesitate about
| spending $30, you're probably worth a lot more to
| advertisers.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| If you have disposable income to spend $30 on an internet
| service, it's likely you also have a mortgage. Mortgage
| search ads alone are around $10 a click IIRC.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Here. [1] I saved you $30 a year.
|
| [1] "Turn Web & App Activity on or off" https://support.googl
| e.com/websearch/answer/54068?co=GENIE.P...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm not this does anything for privacy though. In my tin-
| foil hat mode, I think they take your data and use it how
| ever they want. If you have this enabled, they do these
| "local to you" type of things, and if it is disabled then
| it goes to the main search. However, that does not prevent
| them from saving that data linked to you in another
| table/database. It just means you no longer get the
| "benefit", but you never prevent Googs from benefiting.
| uo21tp5hoyg wrote:
| Isn't this one of those sneaky "we'll still harvest your
| data we just won't save it to your account activity viewer"
| type deals?
| VikingCoder wrote:
| What evidence could I or anyone else offer that would
| convince you?
|
| I'm not trying to be a jerk, I'm genuinely curious what
| you think could convince you. Perhaps you could get a job
| at Google and investigate the relevant code?
| dmitriid wrote:
| This came from documents unsealed in Google v. Oracle.
|
| Opting out of that doesn't mean Google stops tracking
| you. Only some parts of its machinery stop. Even Google's
| own employees have no idea which parts collect which
| data.
| dmitriid wrote:
| To all those downvoting, read yourselves
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/08/unredacted-
| suit-...
| [deleted]
| floridageorgia wrote:
| With 75% gross margin, it would bring the opt out price to
| $120/year. Would you still want to opt out at that price?
| the-golden-one wrote:
| On a similar note, assuming this is done with a default='true',
| would this not be a contender for the most expensive code per
| letter ever?
| dannyr wrote:
| I think part of it is user acquisition and another is
| preventing another competitor to gain traction.
| ricardo81 wrote:
| I can't recall the source of how much Google makes per CPM on
| average, but it's significantly higher than all other search
| engines. If the deal is cheap/value for anyone, it's Google. It
| may have been in the UK CMA report on search/online
| advertising, IIRC it was between $30 and $50 CPM with Bing on
| around half that.
|
| If my arithmetic is right, 1.5bn searches would increase DDG's
| number of searches 15 fold. It would seem only Bing is
| potentially capable of putting in a bid similar to Google's.
| arcticbull wrote:
| My digging indicates that Apple has 1.65B active devices as of
| Q1 2021. The vast majority (1B) are iPhone users, and I suspect
| the vast majority of iOS users use Safari.
|
| Sounds like Google is getting a pretty good deal.
| znpy wrote:
| Every iPhone user is a safari user AFAIK.
|
| AFAIK on iOS you cannot distribute an alternative browser (as
| in UI, network engine and rendering engine) --- you can only
| distribute what is essentially a skin over the default
| browser, Safari.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| On iOS you have to use their JS virtual machine and their
| HTML5 renderer. I think you can write your on UI and
| possibly network engine (although that might be locked down
| as well, but you can definitely proxy all the results.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| But those skinned browsers can have a different default
| search engine
| EE84M3i wrote:
| Google is not the default search engine in China.
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