Yahoo and Microsoft Court Apple as Google's Safari Search Engine Deal Expires in 2015

[kds1]

Google does it best.

Brand Bias!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's the study:

Google Brand Bias

 

[minimo3]

I do not understand why Apple is cozying up with Microsoft these days given how terse relations were in the 1990s.... when Windows PCs with a clearly knockoff interface were eating Apple's market share alive and throwing Apple out of business at the time. Microsoft was making more money just licensing Windows than Apple was with their whole operation.

I am guessing this Bing deal is still a part of the deal that Apple made with Microsoft when they bailed them out in 1997 and Microsoft invested a sizable amount in Apple to have Apple bundle Internet Explorer with every shipping Mac. Looks like this "deal" is still going...

Personally, I grew up in the 1990s during all this, and have been very anti-Microsoft my whole life. I was even very anti-Intel as well, but use the current day Macs anyways once I found they were faster than the PPCs at running OS X.

I would rather see Apple engineer its own search service which blows everything away or which leverages multiple engines. Apple has the money, the resources, the infrastructure and everything else to develop such a system to dominate the future search market.

In business and in geopolitics: the enemy of my enemy is my friend

 

[jonnysods]

I'll just set mine to google via a jailbreak or something.

 

[SgtPepper12]

Yahoo's new "logo" is so amazingly ugly. Can't help but laugh whenever I see it.

On topic though, I used Bing for quite some time and honestly, most of the times it gives exactly the same results as Google.

 

[Razeus]

Do you remember Google Maps in it's early days?

Why are you focusing on the past? What matters is today. In which, Google is superior.

 

[StyxMaker]

I reckon Apple will either switch to using DuckDuckGo/Yandex or buy out DuckDuckGo/Yandex but maintain the philosophy and policy!



Has anyone else switched to using this search engine recently, I really can't fault it and might not be quite as good as google but beats yahoo/bing in my opinion.

I switched to DuckDuckGo as soon as it became available and it's been satisfactory.

 

[Oletros]

Big companies fighting for business, nothing unusual

 

[flottenheimer]

As long as Google provides the best results, that's what I'll have.
And I really don't wish for Apple and Google to drift further apart. I rely on – and love – products from both companies.

 

[StyxMaker]

That deal with Microsoft is LONG over. Plus, these days, Apple is far more pissed off at Google than at Microsoft.

And MicroSoft is no longer, or at least not the only, 800 pound gorilla in the room.

 

[dBeats]

So is iwon.com out of the running?

LOL I'm not sure there are that many people old enough on this forum to remember the fame of iwon.com. All 20 minutes of it...

 

[AlecZ]

Google does search the best by far. But the Google Plus stuff is really annoying, and I avoid logging into any Google services now because they ruined it all.

 

[SixtyK]

Dear Apple,

We are telling everybody how much better our products are and how much yours suck, but please, oh please, please use our search engine.

Please?

Sincerely,
Microsoft

----------

I'm not sure there are that many people old enough on this forum to remember the fame of iwon.com.

LYCOS and WebCrawler REPRESENT! *thumps chest*

 

[dBeats]

Duckduckgo is the best by far. In fact, I can prove it's the best:

If you can't find something and want to use google, duckduckgo will proxy the google result

!g Google Sux

or you want to search Wikipedia

!w Why Google Sux

or you want to search Amazon

!a Books why Google Sux

or perhaps you just want to use Wolfram Alpha

!wa Mathematical proof that Google Sux

And yes you can use these in the search bar of Safari when you set Duckduckgo as your default search engine. All without any tracking of your activity.

 

[882188]

Personally I use DuckDuckGo. I was too tired of all the tracking and ads that comes with Google and was never a fan of MS, so I hope (as others have said) that Apple does a deal that serves the users the best, but leaves the option that we now have to change the default.

DuckDuckGo is what i use, too.
Never used google in years...

 

[StyxMaker]

Yahoo and Microsoft Court Apple as Google's Safari Search Engine Deal Expires...

Dear Apple,



We are telling everybody how much better our products are and how much yours suck, but please, oh please, please use our search engine.



Please?



Sincerely,

Microsoft

----------





LYCOS and WebCrawler REPRESENT! *thumps chest*

I remember one Yahoo was just a list of links was kept manually.

 

[dBeats]

I remember one Yahoo was just a list of links was kept manually.

Made it easy to use with Lynx though, which had great integration with Pine. Good times man good times....

 

[C DM]

I don't give a yahoo long as it's not Yahoo! There are not many domains I truly dislike but Yahoo is on my list. They don't do anything remotely useful in my life.

Many people haven't been giving Yahoo! long for a long time now...and it's still there and doing just fine (if not even better).

 

[Cayden]

As long as I can set my own default it'll be fine, but if I'm forced to go to google.com first, I won't be too happy

 

[bmxracer]

Hopefully they stick with google or make it easy to change. Yahoo is okay and bing is just awful.

 

[bretm]

Thanks for the laugh. What does Eddy Cue know about building a search engine? Last time I checked App Store search/curation is pretty bad.

Can't get much better than spotlight Orr mail search results.

 

[arkmannj]

Made it easy to use with Lynx though, which had great integration with Pine. Good times man good times....

I still love the likes of Pico, Pine, Lynx, etc... and still use them. Lynx obviously gets challenging, but it's great to show students and see their reaction

 

[Sirolway]

Apple need to do whatever provides their users with the best experience. The few times I've tried Bing on the desktop it's been pretty hopeless.

 

[bretm]

Dear Apple,

We are telling everybody how much better our products are and how much yours suck, but please, oh please, please use our search engine.

Please?

Sincerely,
Microsoft

----------



LYCOS and WebCrawler REPRESENT! *thumps chest*

It's just business. Samsung is one of their biggest suppliers. It's a game to them. The suing, the bickering, the negotiating. They don't take it personally any more than two boxing opponents or football coaches.

 

[alexgowers]

apple should offer the best option unless it's done in house like the maps service was. I can't see apple making their own search engine so they should logically choose google as it offers the best customer experience.

Choosing yahoo or bing is just not going to improve the experience on iOS and that should be avoided, it's a slippery slope allowing money to interfere with the customer experience, especially when apple make more than enough dough without that outside crap.

 

[69Mustang]

I like DDG as much as the next guy, but...

I know that Yahoo wanted to back out of the deal with Bing, but for now isnt Yahoo underpinned by Bing? In other words, Apple would be better off going directly to Bing.

Personally I use DuckDuckGo. I was too tired of all the tracking and ads that comes with Google and was never a fan of MS, so I hope (as others have said) that Apple does a deal that serves the users the best, but leaves the option that we now have to change the default.

3 words: Duck Duck Go

<3 DuckDuckGo

I'd love to see Apple swap over to DDG when the contract with Google ends in 2015, and actually, I can easily see them doing that.

1 - DDG is one of the four options you're allowed to pick from in iOS 8 and Yosemite, so Apple is obviously aware of its existance.

2 - DDG is the only search engine that doesn't track you. What with Tim Cook's "They can cart us out in a box" or whatever, I think Apple could swap over to DDG, just to show how committed they are to user privacy.

And if users are free to swap over to using the other search engines, why not?

Plus, besides DDG's main claim to fame of not tracking you, I actually think it's the best search engine on account of !bangs and having the cleanest UI. The only time it ever falls short is when I'm doing image searches... I feel like Google Images normally returns exactly what I'm looking for whereas DDG's images are hit-or-miss.

Finding DuckDuckGo to be an incredible *superior* alternative to Google search.

- the results are great
- if they can precisely answers on a search (product search, book search, wikipedia or stack overflow can answer, etc, etc) it returns the answer on top ! Guess what that area does in Google search ? it fills it with ads
- no creepy tracking

My only issue with DuckDuckGo thus far is the image searching is not as good, thats it, everything else is as good or better. I switched about 6 months ago on my Mac and iOS devices.

DDG is okay. I use it occasionally. But all the DDG advocates never seem to ask themselves the question (and latest tech meme): Can they put on big boy pants? This isn't a popularity contest. It's Pay to Play. I don't think they have the finances to play with the big boys. This new deal will probably go for $1.5-2 Billion a year minimum over a 5 year period.

So it's okay to like DDG, but cold hard reality says they have a better chance of being acquired by Apple than supplying it's search engine. For the record, I would hate that idea. I want DDG to remain independent.