I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds. Why? Mozilla and Apple will lose significant revenue from having Google as the default search engine and Google will no longer have to pay those billions. What's more, no one else can pay to be the default either (eg the short-lived Mozilla Bing deal).
So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle.
I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).
Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight.
Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as much as keeping other competitors away.
We forget that there was at least a decade of several "Google killers" a year [1]. It's a graveyeard. That was 2009 too. The volume slowed down but people are still trying (and failing) [2].
Microsoft has of course tried but Bing is only really propped up by Microsoft's deep pockets. It's not a profitable enterprise (AFAIK). And this is with Microsoft using every trick they can to bypass EU and US consent decrees and legislation to trick users into Bing. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing.
Apple rejected Google Maps and launched their own Maps product in 2012. Obviously they consider this core to their business so I get it. But even with Apple's resources, it's taken more than a decade for Apple Maps to reach some parity with Google Maps.
It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others (ie search).
Think about it. If Apple makes $300 billion in revenue selling iPhones (made up number), how would as an internal leader try and build a search engine? The iPhone will always take absolute priority, mainly because your search engine is such a drop in the revenue bucket. But without these resources and this priority it'll never grow big. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sometimes just throwing money at a problem just isn't enough.
[1]: https://technologizer.com/2009/05/19/a-brief-history-of-goog...
[2]: https://searchengineland.com/neeva-shutting-down-427384
What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.
Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple, they get revenue from the Play Store on it, and again push users to use their own search engine and browser.
They're absolutely golden eggs, they just don't bring in revenue directly the way other products do.
Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.
It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.
You're making the mistake of thinking the pair of eyeballs viewing the ad is the customer/user in this.
The pair of eyeballs are an integral part of the ad product that is sold to customers who buy ad spots.
Cows don't want to be eaten but burgers are absolutely McDonalds golden egg.
Yeah, less golden eggs, and more golden funnels (Chrome, Android).
Youtube, gmail, photos, etc etc etc - absolutely everything consumer facing is a channel for the ad business.
The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.
The big difference is that at that point of time Google search used to be really good but now Google search is really bad so if there is a chance for another competitor in the market, that time is now.
IMHO that’s mainly because the modern open/public internet kind of sucks. The ratio of content to garbage is extremely bad
Circular problem I think, considering a lot of the garbage is a product of SEO and exists solely to game Google’s increasingly poor ranking algorithm.
Maybe. I recall searching the heck out stuff from 2000-2004 for CompSci looking for solutions to homework problems in code. There were a lot of spam sites.
Yeah Bing really isn't bad. And LLMs are basically search engines for most use cases.
I think Mozilla should just run an ad auction to choose the search engine. Bing/MS would pay to capture market share, and Google would pay to prevent Bing from gaining ground.
So let them fight it out.
This is not exactly what’s happening? Google is just willing to pay more.
An exclusive deal is different from an auction.
You can't seriously bring 2009 as a proof the situation now is the same. In Internet terms, it's like arguing current politics with examples of the time of Charlemagne.
Well search engines were actually useful back in those days and there was room for competition.
How a search engine looks hasn't fundamentally changed since then. I'd argue the same about other products, like phones, excel, word, or operating systems like Windows. Yes, the newest versions of these have more sophistication than earlier iterations, but they are just extensions of the original basic idea. Sure the iPhone 15's camera is way better than the original iPhone's, but it's still a phone with a camera and a maps app.
Also, states are different than they used to be, but there is still a lot to learn from history, and you often see that similar struggles get fought over and over, or similar mistakes get made. Verdun has been a major battleground in WW1 because that's where Charlemagne's legacy got split up. As another example of a phrase still relevant today, there is "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...
It makes $10+B per year, pennies next to Google of course, but non-negligible. https://backlinko.com/bing-users#
That's a revenue number, not profit. Also the linked article says $6.24B AFAICT.
If you scroll down a bit you could fine this
Agree it is important to note this is not net, net seems to be about half according to article.
Fascinating links, I had almost forgotten about these engines.
No, in fact, Azure's revenue is higher than that of Windows and Office combined [1]. Microsoft is far more diversified than Google is. Google has been trying for a decade to achieve Microsoft's diversification and has not succeeded (Bard being the latest such failure).
[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...
Yes, that's called a monopoly.
If apple wanted to or thought they could make a profitable search engine, wouldn't they have already done it?
They've been trying to make a car for the past decade, arguably an easier task than making a search engine.
A car is definitely not easier than a search engine. Also they canceled the car.
It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.
or it makes it obvious that Google has had a monopoly for reasons other than the difficulty of making a search engine (this is the truth.)
that was the point. a car is much easier to make, and they couldn't even do that after 10 years.
Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.
Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.
Apple does not like to compete. They would rather call it spatial computing and price their product in an astronomical band than risk being seen as yet another VR headset competitor.
They will never make a search engine.
On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.
The question is not whether Apple could make a profitable search engine. The question is whether they could make a search engine more profitable than the billions they are getting paid each year by Google to make Google search the default.
Also the cost opportunity.
If Apple decides to make a search engine and eats $100 billion out of Google's $500 billion profit (made up numbers), Google will just spend back $100 billion (or whatever constitutes a blank warfare check) for year into completely annihilating Apple's presence. They will literally stop people from finding any page that even remotely mentions their 'AppleSearch' and also deprioritize a bunch of other products too unless if you type out, exact word, 'AppleSearch' or whatever it'd be called.
So now you're Apple, here's a question: Will you spend $200 billion fighting back? When will this stop? You're Apple, and this is a stupid move.
They've been making the iPad calculator for years, who knows how many years they could have spent on developing the search engine
Apple could make a search engine but by the same logic, they wouldn't be able to make it default on their devices.
Why not? They did it for Maps.
Even though Apple hasn’t been sued for Apple Maps, they are not safe from such antitrust charges. The antitrust cases move slowly so it’s possible that they just haven’t gotten to there.
Apple Maps is now on the web ( https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/24/24205449/apple-maps-web-b... )
So far, Company + Map hasn't caused any problems with even bigger players and tighter interegration (Google + Google Maps and Microsoft + Nokia ( https://news.microsoft.com/2013/09/03/microsoft-to-acquire-n... )).
Interestingly, Apple Maps' new beta doesn't work on Linux at all, even with Chrome, so I can't see it. They say it works on Chrome on Windows or Mac, but apparently Apple doesn't like Linux very much.
Just tried it and Chrome isn't supported!
The problem isn’t that Google has search and makes Android. It’s that they have search and paid android phone makes and Apple oodles of money to make Google search the default.
Apple would not need to pay anyone to make their search (or maps or browser) the default. It would be the default on Apple devices and not used much outside of that.
Would that bother Apple? Their platform is the most valuable to advertise on. They’ll make money. The question is, will it make as much as Google was paying?
One would argue that Apple is abusing their monopoly on iOS devices to advance their map business. One could also argue that iOS is not a monopoly since Android has greater market share. Who will win is not settled yet. Right now, the DOJ hasn't come this far, but it is not given that they won't ever go there.
Creating a search engine without stepping in the patent / licensing minefield that Google and Microsoft have put down for each other is not necessarily a profitable or worthwhile venture.
Sure, they could write their own search engine (they also don't do large compute - so they'd be getting it from someone they'd be paying) but Apple would be paying for compute and licensing ... and not have any revenue from it ... and get in trouble with anti-trust or monopoly issues in Europe to boot.
Writing a search engine isn't likely worth the headaches that it would bring to Apple.
and they'd run it on...AWS or GCP?
Search is dead anyways. It’s all SEO nonsense. I would rather have a curated list of validated sights. Like recipes only from actual chefs or publications, news from newspapers and networks, be absolutely sure the address I am looking at is my BANKS website.
All the Reddit, twitter, Pinterest, and blog stuff can stay in the Google wasteland and gotcha ad links.
Oh the irony. You know that:
are the first-party garbage on the Internet? It's all content marketing written to push ads. Yes, including "recipes only from actual chefs" - chefs have better things to do than to maintain an on-line presence; if you see one, it's most likely a brand where the chef gets paid for the rights to their name, and any actual writing is done by marketing interns mashing together whatever they can find on social media.
In fact, if you really want authentic recipes from real chefs, your best bet is Reddit - there's bound to be a few bored chefs hanging around relevant subreddits, exchanging ideas and providing expert tips, just because it's a fun thing to do.
So yeah, search is bad and the web is a SEO wasteland, but the brands big and small aren't victims here - they're the ones who caused it, and who perpetuate it, because it's easier money than actually delivering something of value.
Append reddit to searches is the secret weapon. Use it all the time
Enjoy it while it lasts. Marketers have been wising up to that trick.
By actual Chefs I mean like Bobby Flay or Matha Stewart. I don’t expect working chefs to give away their crafted recipes on a website. I am looking for like a simple crepe and meatloaf recipe, and end up with some really odd SEO boosted directions.
Search is only dead because it's more profitable for Google this way. They don't care that you end up on an SEO farm as long as you are looking at their ads.
I maintain that the point that Google started going down the drain was when they embraced SEO instead of seeing those that try to game the search engine as adversaries.
I waiting for someone to reinvent Yahoo! (aka human groomed site lists). In my mind I can see a browser plugin (or something similar) that users can Up/Down vote specific sites. You can then follow users and see what they think is cool/useful.
They already have a tiny instant search engine which shows 1 result of a url at top.
I’d say its pretty accurate and impressive 95% of the time to the point im impressed at how good its suggestions are considering it’s just the top 1 search.
Funny you're showing up as downvoted, but this is absolutely right. Apple is testing their search abilities with URL autocomplete and it's surprisingly good. It's gotten much better in the last 6 months in particular.
Now you’re downvoted too. I dont know the logic behind us getting downvoted just discussing about a search feature present in apple’s browser
There are some weird people in this thread
Yeah, the calculus is simple. You just lose 20 billion in potential pure profits. Google is paying you 34% of all search revenue originated by you. You have all the financial structure of your own search engine right there.
Just make your own damn search engine. You could even put Google's own ads on it to make some money that way.
God forbid their advertising looks anything like it does in Apple News. But with their recent Taboola deal it would seem like their standards are falling, not rising.
Tim Cook is merely out to keep the stock price going up just like every other business. Because they had a longer runway from the era of Steve Jobs, they look better by comparison but they will try and do every trick that everyone else has done to keep the next quarter going up.
This is completely different than a general-purpose search engine.
and they even completely fail at this easier task
It's both easier and harder. The scale part is easy (the index is <1TB), but there's almost no training data for feedback.
Honestly, I'm surprised to see anyone talk explicitly about Apple internal works. Is that public knowledge?
Yes, all info here:
[9to5Mac article on apple search engine](https://9to5mac.com/2023/10/02/apple-pegasus-google-search/)
So long as they don't prevent users from switching to Google, I'd honestly like to see that search engine. And on the grand scheme of things, maybe it's good for Google to have some pressure against making choices that lead to search results quality decline.
Apple is under anti-trust investigation too. Adding a search engine to their monopoly isn't going to help their case either.
Disagree. People use Google because it's the default, not because they will go out of their way to keep using it. The minute Apple changes the iPhone default, all but a few iPhone users stop using Google.
For those disagreeing, the power of defaults is incredibly powerful, most users are blissfully unaware on how to, or why they might want to change them. Sure, plenty will change it back, but many won't. We've seen this play out with Apple Maps already — Something that may get Apple in trouble too.
Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against them!
No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.
Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default.
How do you explain that?
The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.
That’s because Chrome is vastly better than Edge and that is an exceptional situation. In most other places you look, you will see people using defaults all the time, because defaults are incredibly powerful.
How is chrome vastly better than Edge ? They feel pretty similar but Edge support uBlock Origin on manifest V2.
For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.
That's their opportunity to differentiate from Chrome; they need to support V2 Chromium and fork away from Google's dominion over Chromium.
Google: Hands 20 billion to Apple to keep defaults to Google.
You: No, defaults aren't incredibly powerful.
Those are not incompatible statements at all.
Obviously, defaults matter to some degree. They have a price. Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions, since a small shift redirects a ton of ad revenue. That's fine.
But they're not "incredibly powerful", which implies that most users won't change them. As I pointed out, most users do change from Edge to Chrome.
If defaults were so "incredibly powerful", Edge would be winning. Obviously, therefore, they're not. Defaults have a small-to-medium amount of power. (Which, at Apple+Google scale, happens to be a lot of cash.)
This is HN's regular reminder that market cap measures the value of the company in the eyes of investors, not its revenue or profit.
Apple had gross revenue of $365 billion and Google $257 billion in 2021, the year in which Google paid Apple $26 billion.
That means that in that year Google paid Apple a solid 10% of their revenue and Google's payment accounted for 7% of Apple's gross revenue. To put that in perspective: that puts this deal on the same scale of importance as a car payment or utilities are for the average US household.
Yeah I mean obviously people here in the forum know how to spend 20 billion dollars than the dumb executives there...
On top of that, the mindshare of "Googling it" dominates users brains just as much as Kleenex branding does. I'm sure most of us have watched someone use another search engine to look up Google before.
Yeah, I still say "Google it" even though I've been using DDG and more recently Kagi for years - I discovered saying anything else seems to lose people when trying to help them. Even just saying "search for" gives me deer in the headlight responses until I say "search on google".
Have you tried it recently? "Search for" gets me less 'deer in the headlights' looks than "google it", probably because these days most people are searching for things through apps instead of browser. Browsers are quietly becoming a niche technology with wide swaths of the population.
Browse the web as a normie would, without adblocker/etc extensions and other techy web saavy, and it should quickly become apparent why. Telling people to google something is like telling them to wade into a sewer.
Defaults are incredibly powerful, Safari and Edge are the second and third most popular browsers next to Chrome. Chrome itself is a default on a lot of android devices. Speaking of android devices, Samsung Internet is 4th/5th most popular as it comes default on Samsung devices.
To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.
I think you're confusing defaults with lock-in. Safari, Edge, and Chrome are native browsers tightly coupled to their operating systems. They can't be removed.
Further, anytime a user has to connect to an account for email, calendars, and other essentials, the OS will direct them through the native browser app. This means the so-called "popularity" reflects little more than the number of active devices: Android > iOS > Windows.
Google leverages their monopoly search position to push people towards Chrome, using messages that, to lay people, imply a lot of websites won't work correctly unless they install Chrome. This is the most charitable reading, assuming they don't deliberately impede compatibility with third party browsers.
a lot of that is from past intertia. if the default becomes good enough then newer people who don't know what they like will use defaults unless it's so bad/people recommend that they switch
Simple: All they know is Google.
Launch Edge > Search "Google" > Bing displays Google Search link > Click > Google Search tells user to install Chrome > User installs Chrome > Google maintains browser and search engine monopoly
Defaults matter because many people won't change them, and even people that will change them aren't going to change them every time they touch a new system. Especially when the "defaults" have been that way for decades which brings a sense of gravitational pull back to those tools/sites even if the new defaults change.
Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.
Edge still makes up more than a fifth of Chrome's share on Windows. Without being the default, I expect it would be close to zero.
On Windows, the default browser is edge, but Chrome is far more popular.
What will happen is that people will use Bing without knowing it and then complain that “Google is broken”. To many people, search is google in the same way that a Kleenex is a tissue.
Is this actually true?
Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.
How many stories have you seen with "I search for X, and all the top results are advertisements"? The latest that I recall that I saw on HN was "Now all results above the fold are ads".
Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.
Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.
Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.
While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.
But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.
Id wager SEO/AI slop is a much bigger problem for Google than ad load for their userbase. Only 20% of queries have ads so 4 out of 5 times ads won't even be seen. But on those 4 out of 5 do have the chance of turning users away from Google with awful SEO optimized sites and AI slop.
Yes it is true.
The company I currently work at is 95% Bing users because they all use Edge and Bing is the default.
It's a medium sized company of normal non techie people.
The default matters.
This.
Since W11 I've seen much more _normies_ use Edge and the result is that they are using Bing for their searches.
On the other hand, Google is the default on Android's Chrome and iOS' Safari, so they use Google there.
But can Bing the default for Edge after this suit? I believe even Edge needs to ask which search engine to be used in the beginning. If that happens, possibly even more non techie's may use Google.
People have buy-in to Chrome that I think might be more than the buy-in to the search engine at this point. People like their set of extensions, and know how to use it.
Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.
I mean Google obviously thinks it is otherwise they wouldn't be paying Apple $20 billion a year.
It's funny you say that because as an Edge user, I constantly get bombarded with popups on Google websites asking me to switch to Chrome. It's all about who's on top and how to keep it that way, not quality.
Fair point, but I wasn't able to verify the claim that most Windows users are not using Edge since its release. I am curious what the actual % is for new Windows PC installs that are not governed by a corporate policy.
Not just normies, its just the best search engine…
Yes and no.
Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.
No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.
Chrome is not anyone's default browser, but it still has dominance. People will be bothered a little under some circumstances.
Chrome is a complicated case in general because Google poured money into promoting Chrome and had some of the most popular sites on the web promoting it heavily and actively sabotaged Firefox at several key points. I respect a lot of the Chrome team’s early work but it’s very hard for me to see that as a story about fair competition alone.
So, to summarize: defaults are powerful, but advertising is more powerful.
Not just advertising: Mozilla could not have put a “better in Firefox” button on Gmail or YouTube at any price, or forced Google to follow through on their promise around H.264, etc.
Microsoft is literally doing this, and yet...
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/12/microsoft-edge-will-...
Google also tried to push PC OEMs to pre-install Chrome on their new PCs when Chrome was new.[1] Sony/VAIO is the only manufacturer to have known to take the bait.[2]
[1] https://www.crn.com.au/news/google-may-pre-install-chrome-br...
[2] https://thenextweb.com/news/sony-computers-google-chrome-bro...
Specifically, Google was leveraging their existence as "THE web" to push their web browser. Every single Google property aggressively displayed banners and reminders and nag prompts ensuring you "Gmail is best in Chrome" and other nonsense that "Just one click here to fix".
Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.
It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.
Yeah, this is the thing that gets me. Chrome is the (rare) exception when we're talking about defaults generally winning, not the rule.
An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.
Chrome is the default on Chromebooks which has a decent marketshare.
Are you sure about that? As I said in another comment that’s not my experience. Might be wrong, I’ll double check tomorrow at work.
I am 100% positive. Which browser do you think is the default on a Chromebook?
My bad, I ready to fast and understood "google search" while you wrote "chrome".
Very strange statement to make given a large mobile phone operating system (Android) has Chrome as the default browser. Also the default in some Linux distros such as the Raspberry Pi OS. And many PC builders bundle Chrome with their usual crapware. Other posters have also pointed out Google's own Chromebooks use Chrome by default as well. Quite a significant base especially among people who don't have the money to buy into the Apple ecosystem.
For factual correctness, I'll point out that Chrome is the default on (Pixel) Android and ChromeOS.
Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Chrome became the dominant browser on Windows even though Internet Explorer/Edge is the default browser and comes preinstalled.
Because it was helped by already nearly ubiquitous Google search shoving it down everyone's throat on every page
And then ubiquitous Youtube dealing the killing blow: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/05/ex-youtube-engineer-...
But your article argues the opposite of your claim.
Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life.
The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the order of the browsers was to be randomized so to avoid the appearance of giving undue prominence to Chrome. Finally the article ends by noting that each of the three options Youtube recommended were chosen equally as opposed to Chrome being the option picked by most people who saw the banner.
This sounds like the exact opposite of shoving it down peoples throats and instead trying to be very careful to move people away from a browser that Microsoft themselves had declared was dead, and onto an alternative option by trying to be as fair as possible.
The significance of your article isn't that Google shoved Chrome down everyone's throat in order to kill off a competitor, it's that due to its popularity and dominant position, Youtube was more effective at getting people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 than Microsoft was, but both companies had the same objective.
Here is an article about Microsoft's own "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." which discusses Microsoft's own efforts to get people to stop using IE 6. It's about the same period of time as the article you mentioned.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-friends-dont-let-fri...
It's not. The article talks about Youtube nailing the final nail in IEs coffin, which it did.
As for shoving Chrome down everyone's throats I'm amazed no one remembers the ancient history of just 15 years ago:
- showing it on search pages: http://www.webandsay.com/archives/google-is-actively-pushing... - prominently showing it on Youtube: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/11/how-google-promotes...
Fascinating how two people can read the same article and take away two opposite conclusions from it. If anything what Youtube did helped Firefox far more than it helped Chrome, but I suppose from your point of view it's the opposite.
Ah well, c'est la vie!
Let's see:
- huge ad banners promoting Chrome
- literally almost singlehandedly killing IE 6.0
- sabotaging Firefox: https://archive.is/tgIH9
This... this is not ancient history. It happened 10-15 years ago. Unless you're very young, and I've fallen under the curse of the old age:
--- start quote ---
One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well
--- end quote ---
That's more the exception that proves the rule, though. Chrome originally came out when IE was still a steaming pile of garbage, and Google spent lots of marketing money promoting it as a better, faster alternative. (Something that Mozilla had been previously somewhat succeeding at, more or less, but they didn't have the same resources and eventually lost their gains and fell behind.)
These days Chrome just has so much mind-share that it overcomes the defaults on Windows. This is by no means a common outcome. This is anecdotal, but I know far more people who use Safari instead of Chrome on macOS than who use Edge instead of Chrome on Windows; Microsoft just has such a bad reputation when it comes to browsers that Chrome is able to get over that defaults hump on Windows. But a lot of people genuinely like Safari, and trust Apple in general, so the effect is (somewhat) lessened on macOS, even though IIRC Chrome still does have the lead in market share there. Just less of one, percentage-wise.
You're right on some points, other points don't match up with my understanding of the issue.
Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree.
However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them to be significantly superior to the alternatives, such as Bing and even DuckDuckGo (which I believe predominantly makes use of Bing) and that people will switch from whatever default search engine Apple sets to Google.
You're also missing the power of reputation. It takes time to build a good reputation, and it takes a really long time to overcome a bad reputation. MS built itself a really bad reputation, especially with browsers, so even if (hypothetically speaking) Edge were as good as Chrome now, it would still take a very long time to overcome the terrible reputation they earned with IE.
Apple doesn't have this problem.
Not from what I've seen - I often see people searching Bing for Google then searching on there, not knowing how to change the default.
Of course defaults mean very little for tech-savvy people. An average 50 year old who just got a new laptop isn't going to change the search engine because Bing was the default.
i guess the fun thing about this is that we're about to find out if you or the person you're replying to is correct
if that’s true, expect another antitrust lawsuit soon after.
Using market dominance to enter other markets is the problem…
I say this as a heavy apple user myself btw.
"They simply have a better product"
I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.
Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.
People always _always_ forget that Google today is an ad company first.
They do search, phones and mobile operating systems as side projects.
Gross over simplification.
Out of Google's 2023 revenue of 305.63e9 US-$, 77.8% (237.86e9 US-$) was advertising revenue.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven...
They are obviously not only an ad company, but GP only claimed that they are an ad company "first". Can you please clarify which part you consider oversimplified?
Consider the case of a YouTuber who gets most of their revenue through superchats. They regularly upload videos, a couple times a week, and receive ad revenue and the od sponsorship deal. Once a week they do a livestream Q&A which is where the bulk of that superchat revenue comes from.
Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader?
Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.
Yes. And if you press them economically, it will show.
The only difference is that most people do not optimize their lives for profit.
Maybe, it depends on what they do next. Will they start uploading fewer videos and live-streaming more because they realised that’s where the money is?
Agreed. But Google does put ads first. All the tracking, web proposals, Chrome, it’s all in service of ads. Perhaps you’re using an ad blocker and that’s making you forget, but Google’s services, like search and YouTube, are huge blobs of ads with a few bits of content sprinkled throughout and the ratio is getting worse in the ads’ favour. So yes, Google is an ad company. Not because it makes the most money from it, but because most of its effort is in expanding and defending their ad revenue. Heck, they literally spend billions of dollars just to make sure you search with their engine to see their ads.
True, but in addition to the revenue Google ALSO tailors all their products to facilitate their advertising products. It's sort of like a singer who sells merch. The merch makes money but it also props up the singers singing career and funds tours.
Chrome revolves around ads, android revolves around ads, maps revolves around ads, gmail revolves around ads. If you take a hard look at all their products their all linked to Google's advertisement offerings in one way or another. That, to me, means adtech is their main line of business.
Considering that the recent Google code leak only substantiated that Chrome is the honey pot for surveillance and data harvesting that people long suspected, even any supposedly not ad related work is technically also ad related work.
It’s something people have a really difficult time preaching logically, the veil of deception of many things. Another big example is TV, which are ad sales companies, not TV show distributors, even if they’ve successfully swindled people into a mindset where they actually pay the providers, for the privilege of being sold advertisement.
It’s really a rather interesting and eye opening segment of largely the US society that is both extremely dominant and has effectively been extremely damaging, and yet, people simply cannot see that they are like mindless drones, being programmed and reprogrammed with TV shows and advertisement.
By that logic, any product/organization that generates revenue mainly through ads would be an ad company. Search is the product that (probably) carries most of the ads revenues, so that's the main product, and ads are the means for generating revenue around it.
What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (which may or may not jive with what is in your head).
Google doesn’t just show ads, they track you and have the infrastructure to sell your information to people who buy ad space. That is fundamentally different from a website that makes money by showing ads, many of which they don’t pick themselves. So yes, Google is an ad company. And they’re one “first” because that’s where their efforts are, not because of the revenue. YouTube, Chrome, their web proposals, it all serves the same goal: ads, ads, ads, and keeping Google’s dominance in the space.
Last I checked Google doesn't 'sell your information to people', but it does offer hyper targeted ads; the ethics of both scenarios are deeply rotten to me.
So you understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t mean selling the information directly. Because why would they, they make more money by keeping the data to themselves and selling you out indirectly from the information they gathered over and over.
It's digital pimping. Google are fully-automated, mass-scale digital pimps. They pimp your eyeballs out to Johns who pay for the privilege of mindfucking you, with the help of an extremely sophisticated matchmaking and realtime auction system. In return, you get nice handbags (YouTube) and get your hair did (GMail).
Calling it "ads" and Google an "advertising company" is just making a vague allusion to what's really going on and does not carry the proper connotation of exploitation.
Yes, because they get a competitive advantage when they hold all that information for themselves.
They have your email (gmail), location history (google maps), search history (google), viewing history (youtube) and know pretty much every site you've visited (chrome + ad network).
This is the data they aggregate and sell to advertisers so that their ads can target highly specific groups of people - they don't want the advertisers getting the direct dataset, that would be competition.
Yes. I would characterize a company that mainly generates revenue through ads as an ad company.
How in the world would they get ads to people without those platforms? Doesn't all the data they use to sell targeted ads come from your search history and phone usage, etc.?
For a decade of so I was in charge internal web page for mobile users. I had control over the devices the end users had, the web browser they used, I maintained the back end. In that deployment the best product was Firefox.
There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.
Occasionally pushing a bad update is a symptom of having 10x as many Devs pushing 10x as many features each month.
Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.
I don't think you can scale or compare like that numerically. Every commit isn't a chance for it to break for users because they bundle however many commits into a release and resources required to test the release don't scale per commit.
I think most of the recent breakage has been server side changes and feature flags. Ie "whoops, people who were in this 1% experiment had their browser crash when we pushed an update to the spell check dictionary because we didn't test that combination".
Risks like that scale closer to the number of features/number of Devs, since Devs can be fiddling with server side config outside the release process.
More devs writing more code causes more bugs.
Seems to make sense.
This doesn't seem like a disagreement. They still have the best search engine at the moment.
They really don't, though Kagi costs $. Even ignoring that it's a bit unclear, since in many cases DDG or bing give better results.
Do you have any examples or types of query of where a free search engine produces better results?
I tried to Google for it, but maybe expectedly, that doesn’t bring up any good examples.
I think free has the be table-stakes for the default search engine, because otherwise you are forcing all users to change or buy a license, so any paid alternatives are out.
Disclaimer: Work at Google; not on search-related things, opinions my own.
I can only name one example where Bing gives better results, but it's only because Google intentionally doesn't: 123movies
They're still better than the alternatives
I am not commenting on your whole comment but I noticed I am looking more and more on reddit for randomnumber45123's advice than listicles or press review articles that haven't used for 6 months the product I am considering buying.
Of course I just add "reddit" to my google query. I heard something was going on with google and reddit though (no irony, just hadn't time to check out what it's about yet).
You'd search reddit how? Using their search? Good luck.
You forget something. Reddit's search engine has historically been absolute dogshit. In fact there was a short time period it just opened a google window back in the day because they struggled to get it to work. It's gotten better in recent years but it's relatively meh compared to just having google search the reddit domain. Lol
Reddit search sucks, in my experience I get much better results using Google vs Reddit search.
"I expect this to be bad for everyone except Google if the ruling holds."
If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1
Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved.
We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-competitive conduct is illegal. Whether it is prudent or not. It makes no difference whether the payments were actually "necessary".^2 Google made them anyway, repeatedly.
1. Even more, this "prediction" implies there will be an appeal ("... if this ruling holds."). Why bother with an appeal if this decision has no negative effect on Google.
2. One only needs to show the conduct had an anti-competitive effect.
Please read the decision:
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...
It’s only solved if nobody does it. If Google stops those payments unilaterally MS would just make a slightly cheaper deal with Apple..
That sounds bad for Google... ?
I think the point is that if Google is not allowed to make such payments, neither is Microsoft (unless they want to risk the same lawsuit against them). Apple will stay with Google since a change would probably be unpopular with users. End result: Default search engines stay the same, but Google doesn't have to pay for it anymore.
I think this ignores Apple could still develop their own search engine, as they did with Maps, and pocket the ad revenue themselves.
They could, and they should, but they definitely won't. Similar to how they use just a ChatGPT anonymized wrapper for their "advanced AI features", they'll just outsource search to some big player as well.
It's no longer a competitive market. MS can lowball like crazy now
So really it's just a loss for everyone all around. But at least nobody is being anti-competitive I guess.
Except Apple and Mozilla for whom it’s a huge part of their profits/revenue respect
Deals are mutually beneficial. If Apple and Mozilla were both taking Google's offer it's because neither felt they had more to gain from developing their own search engine to compete outright in the meantime or from offering someone else's as a default. There might be something to the argument Mozilla isn't in a position to reject the money because they're sort of a shambling corpse at this point but Apple is about as far from a desperate company as you can get.
It makes no sense to "expect this will be bad for everyone except Google" based on this opinion. "This" has yet to be defined. The court has not even set a date for the trial to determine the remedy yet. All we know at this point is that Google broke the law. We do not know what will be the consequences.
Isn't it reasonable to assume that one of the consequences will be "Google, and nobody else, can do this," therefore applying OP's logic?
not necessarily. Google cannot do this because in their case it is "abuse of market power" ... but if a market participant with a small market share does it it likely isn't "abuse of market power".
antitrust is not about market share, it's about abuse of the power that comes with it.
HN commenters defending Apple have stated many times that iOS installations do not comprise a majority share of the "smartphone" market.
Can we assume that if Microsoft paid Apple to be the default search engine in iOS instead of Google then Microsoft would have market share, or some other source of monopoly power, sufficient to allow the DoJ and state AGs to bring essentially the same antitrust case against Microsoft.
There is this ridiculous "argument" from HN commenters I see sometimes, too often, when "developers" or so-called "tech" companies they work for are caught doing something wrong. It goes something like, "If we didn't do it, then someone else would have so don't blame us."
it's more complicated than that. if MS paid Apple to be the default that would probably be anti-competitive against even smaller search engines. (but paying for search traffic is likely not in itself anti-competitive. doing it to keep others out of the market is when you are Google. where's the boundary? well, yes, it's complicated, depends on which market, what audience, how easy it is to switch providers, etc.)
Reminds me of the "If I don't steal your home, somebody else will" incident. Classic scumbag mentality.
I think the important argument for^1 is that this prevents other search engine from bidding on the slot. It certainly would be an issue for Google if Apple products defaulted to Bing.
>If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it
To stop Apple from creating its own search engine.
This is a huge claim. Do you have any evidence to back it up?
I fail to see your reasoning. The court's argument is Google is maintaining this dominance via these default deals, not that it got there through them.
Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with any provider.
Edit: Changed exclusive to default.
There are no exclusivity deals.
These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity.
Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.
It is exclusivity. I've been involved in some of these contracts going all the way back to the Summer of 2004 and they absolutely involve exclusivity. If Safari or Firefox product managers added a new search access point and their business people tried to sell default placement for that new search access point, they'd violate their contract. That's exclusivity. Opera used to do that kind of thing, they had three different search defaults for three different access points in the 2000s but by 2010 Google was no longer allowing that in their contracts because exclusivity.
That might just be overloading the term in a way that clouds the issue though? The exclusive default search provider for a browser vs the exclusive search provider for a browser is pretty different.
Oh yeah, i thought the previous user used them interchangeably. I messed it up. I think it's exclusive in a way that no one else could make the same deal. Not explicitly locking others out, but in a significant way, it implicitly did.
The point was they became a monopoly cos they had a good product, and now the product is not as good after these default deals they made with Apple, Samsung etc.
Google started when the tech sector considered the search problem "solved". You had the likes of Altavista, Yahoo and AskJeeves. There was some variety (eg Yahoo's directory) but no one thought search was going to be a big business.
Then Google came along and ripped them all to shreds from 1998-2006 or so. The most important platform was Windows and Google gained dominance there without paying anyone. Sure, you can argue Microsoft didn't take it seriously (because they didn't).
Then Microsoft did start taking it seriously and the smartphone revolution happened. If you were around at the time, you may remember that many networks simply couldn't handle the anticipated (and actual) Internet traffic from iPhones. IIRC I saw figures that an iPhone user used >8x as much data as the most recent Nokia phone user with Internet connectivity. Why? Because using a browser on an iPhone was a quantum leap forward in terms of power and usability.
Bing was really the only serious threat here simply because Microsoft had deep pockets. So Apple was able to extract (extort) Google to keep it as the default search on iOS.
Bing tried exclusivity deals, most notably with Bing but it was short-lived. Google also pays Firefox but it's less than they earn from that user and no one else can afford that. If no one else can do the same Google wins.
But the main point is that when given a choice, the majority of people choose Google because it is better for most people.
Where exclusivity typically hurts is where it's used to push an inferior product or at least a product where the product isn't preferred.
Now the DoJ could argue that we want to avoid getting to the point where Google has an inferior product but has the market domination and deep pockets to keep out competitors. Maybe that's valid. But I think in the short-to-=medium term, this has simply saved Google billions of dollars a year.
Also, for smaller search engines like DDG, they can never afford the billions Google could Billions was material, even to Apple. What DDG could pay isn't. It's not worth taking.
I don't think the search problem was considered solved. More like unsolvable. Some new search engine would show up every so often and be good, but fall into the same terrible abyss of mediocrity as all the others in 6-12 months. Thus the meta-search engines like DogPile that would search "all" the search engines and give you a blended result.
Google disrupted that by continuing to be good for at least 10 years before it fell into mediocrity. Unfortunately, the web has gotten so big that developing a new search engine is very expensive, and (IMHO) there hasn't been a new good search engine since Google. I've moved to DuckDuckGo, but I think it's only good enough, not good. I was at Yahoo when they launched their self-hosted search in 2004 and it was good, but they couldn't get enough marketshare to keep investing in it.
Discovery in the mid-90s was excruciatingly bad. Google really did rescue the web in that regard.
I remember searching AltaVista for GNU’s website (at the time, they didn’t have their own domain, or weren’t using it) and I’m pretty sure I had to go to page 2 or 3 of the results to find it.
There was a brief window where people would look at me like I was some kind of crazy wizard when they saw me use DogPile.
Prior to that, I used Watson[1] to accomplish something similar.
[1](http://www.karelia.com/watson/)
I think they're saying is that in Google's very early days, they gained market dominance against a dozen other search engines simply by being better. It wasn't until years later that they started paying to be the dominant search engine.
I agree but I that's not what the GP said.
Google is not the default search provider on Windows. It is not the default search provider in Edge. Microsoft prompts at varying levels of annoyingness to get you to stay with their solutions. Historically it was even harder with IE. Despite all this, folks often switch to chrome and google search.
IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.
Not sure if that is true-competition laws often prohibit the dominant market player from doing certain things, yet still allow smaller players to do the same thing.
I assume OP meant in terms of money. Apple will not accept scraps (like tens of Millions) for the default search engine, after getting billions from Google. And no-one else will have the financial resources or be willing to burn these amounts (Microsoft) to offer similar numbers.
They don't need to offer similar numbers? If this ruling prohibits Google, the dominant search engine, from buying their Safari defaults, then Apple has a choice of:
- Zero dollars
- More than zero dollars from a smaller search competitor (Bing? New AI player?)
I suspect Apple will want more than nothing. They also have quarterly financials to report.
Apple's biggest disincentive to continue the practice is that they themselves end up in the monopoly crosshairs from time-to-time, and it doesn't look good in terms of the DOJ targeting them if they continue a practice that was ruled monopolistic with another company. It isn't necessarily monopolistic if they do, but it raises suspicion.
(Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").
Apple creating their own search engine will likely raise more eyebrows than letting an existing Google competitor buy their way into the iPhone ecosystem. In fact the DOJ may prefer a smaller player turn into a bigger competitor to Google, even if that's Microsoft's Bing.
As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly.
Apple will want more than zero dollars.
Millions might as well be zero to Apple. There is overhead when it comes to dealing with another company, combined with the potential of damaging your brand. If the number is not in the billions I doubt they would bother. The only companies capable of paying the amounts that would make it worthwhile would be excluded from this option.
This is true if:
- A new deal with another company is actually in the millions. There are a lot of numbers between zero > 20B that's currently being paid for that default setting.
- Said deal remains small and doesn't grow over time, even as a new competitor to GOOG starts eating away at their market share and spreads around search ad revenue.
one of the biggest brands in the world, with how many billions in CASH .. needs the money.. This is the same nonsense that WSJ peddles everyday.. "greed is good" and makes the world go around, details are just in the way.
No, actually.. there are other parts of society that are touched by this, and their children btw.. Apple and Google and whomever are now bumping against the edges of Big Society. There is no predicting what will come out of the woodwork on this IMHO
This is the key.
I'm not saying Google couldn't be better. But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it.
Spam garbage overrunning the web is the underlying issue.
Not when it's detrimental to their sources of income, i.e. Ad Sense.
I think it's reasonable to assume that google would favor the Ad Sense customer given two results that are otherwise of equal or near equal quality but the notion that google would exclude good results from domains that do not serve Ad Sense ads is absurd.
Why is it absurd? If it's still considered the go-to option by most users, they could afford the slightly worse quality for the extra revenue, no? That's the end result of monopolies, the provider starts to compromise on the service to capitalize on the user's lack of viable options.
The product is more than just the index! The UI has become cluttered with ads that are barely distinguishable from genuine results. The functionality around using quotation marks for exact-match results has now become broken and confusing.
Depends on the definition of "better", I think.
Google is an ad company first. It stands to reason than their results optimize for ad profitability, not to have the best index.
If the goal was to have the best index, they would actively punish sites that use SEO to push sites that are nothing more than auto-generated affiliate links to Amazon products. I quit using Google a while ago, because that’s all I was getting. I use Kagi now, which had no ads. Without this conflict of interest, I find things go better.
I had a coworker insist on using ddg for privacy reasons and he was a bit smug about it even though meetings where he was presenting while searching the web always started with a ddg search and ended with him sighing and giving up by using !g to switch to google. I think, even in it's less than ideal state, people still underestimate how much time google's tailored search can save you when you train it to figure out you want to see development/technical documentation.
I've frequently found better results by using the !g when searching for technical docs and other programming-related stuff.
But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.
Often when searching with google I stick !g in front of my query without thinking, and only realize when it shows up in the search bar after the page loads.
I'm curious, what kind of presentations involve searching the web on the spot?
As if to answer my own question, I just came out of a call which involved me sharing my screen while I searched the web for info on the memory consumption of classes in dotnet. I take it back!
This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade?
google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was.
That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostly spam sites with autogenerated content along with sales and advertising sites. It can't find any of the actual user-generated honest content anymore.
Google nowadays is more about hiding and manipulating results to push an agenda than letting users finding was they're searching for.
Lol, no google isn't out to get you rightwingers.
Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.
It's leaking into Youtube as well, there have been a few times where I have searched for a video using it's exact name and I would have to scroll far down the list to find the correct search result in a sea of irrelevant garbage. You'd think if you search for video "XYZ", video "XYZ" would be the first result and not somewhere at the bottom of the list.
Really, really curious how this all plays out WRT Mozilla. Mozilla receives on the order of 80% of their revenue from making Google the default search engine on Firefox. They're going to have to layoff the majority of their employees.
That's entirely on Mozilla and the slew of incompetent CEOs who did nothing but pocket millions and buy out useless products like Pocket instead of directing funds where they should've gone, the development of their browser.
If I could donate to Firefox development, I would've a long time ago for a generous monthly sum, but since I know it's just going to be squandered by becoming another advertising company [1], then I'm not too bothered by it.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...
Working 10 hours per week was nice while it lasted.
There is no one to blame but the leadership at Mozilla for the position they are in. They had a decade+ to try to create additional revenue streams but botched every attempt.
It's like you didn't understand what this case was about at all. Google isn't paying to be first, Google is paying so nobody bothers making a competitor.
ITT: People not understand the basics of a monopoly.
people keep bothering to make competitors, they simply have no chance at success having kept getting locked out by Google's anticompetitive practices
That’s just a waste of money then. Why are they paying bilious to Mozilla and Apple? Because they’re good buddies? Wouldn’t people use Google anyway?
Just imagine the Google CFO looking through the finance spreadsheets last year and instead of going “let’s layoff a whole bunch of people” they go with “let’s stop paying Apple and Mozilla” for default search.
Not necessarily. At least some of the benefit for Google is that they prevent a competitor from paying to be the default search.
Your point stands but there's an argument to be made they paid Mozilla so that they don't collapse and then have to defend a monopoly lawsuit on Chrome.
Wow, if Google had hired you, your insight would've saved them many billions every single year! They're such fools for spending all that money when it had absolutely no impact on their position in the market!
Before this ruling: whoever pays the most gets to be the default, so google pays. If they don't someone else does.
After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.
This seems to contradict the testimony. Assisting to tfa, there was no price Microsoft could pay that would have made Apple use Bing by default.
We got some chromebooks at (totally un-tech) work. Some are set with quant, some duckduckgo and some other misterious (to me) search engines. When you open the browser for the first time it gives you a list of ~10 to choose. Knowing the constant days cadence, delay and stress we handle I can easely picture my colleagues picking the closest to mouse to access the web without loosing a second.
Can't you set a group policy and have it default to Google or whatever search engine you want?
Maybe but that would be unproductive : google if full of ads at the top of the page and we would probably need to scroll, loosing precious time. Don’t think coworkers avoid it on purpose though.
I tried to switch to DDG, I even gave myself 90 days. On day 91 I immediately switched back.
I also left DDG, but have been very satisfied with Brave's search. [1] They also have a nice optional LLM system built in that provides citations to what it says, which is pretty neat. They also have 'goggles' which enable you to apply or create a chosen filter to reorder/refilter results. So e.g. getting news while blocking partisan sites (or indulging our own partisan preferences), searching only tech blogs, blocking big tech sites, searching for video/audio from non-YouTube sources or whatever else. Lots of neat stuff that I'm surprised other sites haven't cloned yet.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/
I never had good luck with DDG, and found myself using !g to jump over go Google a lot.
I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose.
Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often.
It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.
Google seemed to think the many billions of dollars spent annually to insert Google into other products was necessary in order to maintain dominance in the search market. This wasn't disputed right? I doubt they are relieved now that Bing, OpenAI and others have charismatic products that appear to threaten their core competency right as the business is declared a monopoly.
...advertising market, i.e. selling the users of search to advertisers
The problem is that when you bundle products, you can maintain your market dominance even when competitors have a better product. Microsoft has shown this to be true countless times, most recently with MS Teams (vs Slack).
Furthermore it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water and for that you likely need long term, sustained investment to pour into R&D. How many VCs are willing to play that long game and invest when you have an incumbent paying $20B+ to block user choice?
The creation of Firefox and Google Chrome are examples of competition that tremendously benefited consumers, but which took many years to play out, after the government ruled against monopolistic behavior.
More than that, it's the de facto default for anyone who can be bothered to change it. It also reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard. It's somewhat better than the competition, but not better enough to justify changing. Google's search competitors are trying, but they're not obviously much better.
There is usually a requirement from regulator to present the top N options in random order to the user and it's likely a reasonable number of people will just pick the first in the list resulting in some market share loss for Google.
Stupid them then. I don't and now I won't have to see Google defaulted to everywhere.
This is great news. If Mozilla can't afford to provide Firefox anymore then they could ask for donations or provide a paid product. I'd pay for firefox if they stripped out the google and pocket crap.
They don't have a better product, not for a long time, but they do have a famous product, with which most of the people are familiar with, unlike the competitors. They have been matched and over-matched long ago, but since virtually nobody within 99% accuracy makes research on current search engine market before typing into the box, that doesn't matter - people know google, so people go to google, however inferior their product would be. If it's not literally useless, they'll keep using it for a while now.
there is also Android ecosystem, where DOJ may ask google to prompt user with Search Egnine selection dialog, and Google can easily lose some significant share of traffic to Bing/ChatGPT/etc.
Google I use 40 percent of the time vs. 60 percent chatGPT. Google is definitely on the start of a decline!
They had a good product, but have screwed it up. Have you tried Kagi?
I dipped my toes and have never looked back, not once. It’s quick, it’s good, I have some neat customisation. The less-geeky family have joined me. The downside? It’s paid. But it’s worth it.
If that was completely true, Google would not be paying billions for the placement. Google is better than the rest, but for most things the others are good enough. I think a large portion of people don't really need amazing results, but Google needs their eyeballs and clicks.
Google is going to lose money. Their search has been declining for years and the top 1/2 or so of a search is nothing but ads. So, while they may pay for deals, they will likely also lose traffic that helps pay for those deals.
I was thinking this too, but on second thought, I can't imagine Apple making Google the default for free under any circumstances. That's a ton of free referrals, in a way the best advertising slot that exists on an iPhone.
With how the market is looking as of today, the next YC batch might have a promising carrier pigeon startup and a ridesharing blip services that monetizes with ads!
If you think nothing changes why did Google waste so much money paying? What were they missing that you don't?
I think this idea is incredibly short-sighted.
Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default.
You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine.
You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees.
Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.
Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing.
My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.
or bing pays to be the default? or apple choose to give some upstart like duckduckgo a chance? Or they produce their own search engine (not that i think they will).
This would be a great thing for Firefox. That Google money is toxic in more ways than one.
Then they wouldn't have those deals in the first place.
Companies don't just piss off money for no reason. And the reason is simple: They want no competition - they strictly maintain their dominance through them.
Just saying "No" isn't enough. You have to explain why they have those deals if you think this isn't the reason why. Otherwise, anyone reasonable must disagree by default.
The ruling doesn’t say exclusive distribution agreements are illegal. It says Google can’t enter into them.
Most users will probably use the default. And there's zero reason (zero dollars) saying it will be Google.