Apple Wants to Help Google Defend Search Engine Deal Worth Billions

[Jack Burton]

I quit using Google search altogether when they started force-feeding AI into their results.

I'm 100% DDG now.

Saw a youtube video in which the person added swear words to their google search and it killed AI results. Funny if it works, have not tried it yet myself.

 

[johnsc3]

I wonder if Redmond wants to / is helping the US.

 

[robertosh]

So 20 billions is the cost of (non) privacy for Apple

 

[surferfb]

The fact of the matter is Google is the best free search engine. DuckDuckGo is private, but terrible. Bing is terrible. I use Kagi, which I think is as good as, if not better, than Google but no way Apple is going to make a paid search engine the default.

I suspect Apple would have Google as the default even if they weren't being paid. Apple know most people aren't going to change the default (or even know how to change the default). Remember the ridicule Apple got when it switched to Apple Maps? It'd be 10x worse if they switched away from Google. And that's before you get into the issues the traffic increase that would come from all of a sudden setting, say, DuckDuckGo as the default on every phone worldwide would cause.

The options that could handle the traffic are really Google or Bing. And that is absolutely no contest - Google is far superior.

 

[DocMultimedia]

Tl;dr, Apple stands to lose a lot of money from Google per year if the case doesn’t go their way.

Funny thing is, this money is about one single line in the Safari code.

I'd love to be that programmer. 😀

 

[ajonymous]

If probably costs Apple a couple thousand dollars on administrative minutia per year. So, ROI is on the order of magnitude of 1 billion percent. Of course, that plummets to an order of magnitude of only 100,000% once expensive lawyers get involved. IOW, the numbers here are crazy.



Your observation that you use GPT is the key one here. We are in the process of having search engines replaced by a new technology. Even if we grant that Google has had a monopoly by dint of this deal with Apple -- which I do not -- that advantage is now being eliminated by market competition from AI.

This is a key issue with antitrust in the age of exponential technology growth. By the time governments identify, build, and prosecute a case against a monopoly, the conditions of the market may have changed to the point that the intervention is either unnecessary or ineffective. The government can only act after a monopoly has been established for a long enough period of time that it doesn’t appear to be just a temporary fluctuation in the market. Nowadays, due to the pace of growth, by the time the government can act and prosecute, technology has already advanced to a point that the monopoly is being broken by competition from innovative competitors.

We've seen this multiple times now. AI started to replace search engines even while the DoJ argued against search-engine monopolies. Internet Explorer had already been eclipsed by Firefox, with Chrome on the rise by the time the EU forced Microsoft to allow a different default browser, not to mention that desktop browsers were rapidly being eclipsed by mobile-computing browsers. In more recent years, Facebook was seen to be a rising monopoly in social media, particularly after its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. By the time the government started considering action to break up Facebook, TikTok was already disrupting the market.

Ultimately, antitrust enforcement in the digital age risks being either too late to matter or unnecessary altogether. If legal action cannot match the speed of technological change, market forces become the only truly effective check on monopoly power.

We also, as a society have been fed the tired line, “the wheels of justice move slowly”. I think at this point, that has never mattered more

 

[DocMultimedia]

Prior to Google there was Altavista. Altavista was a great search engine. DEC would still be around today had its management understood the value of Altavista. Unfortunately, its fate was sealed and it was treated with neglect by its subsequent owners (Compaq, Overture, and finally Yahoo!). It is an odd twist of fate that Xoogler Marissa Meyer was the CEO of Yahoo! when it shutdown Altavista.

I was more of an AskJeeves guy. Lol. The early web days were fun. I was once the Yahoo site of the Day back in 95, so also enjoyed them. I miss the early 90s web, but I'm a geezer.

 

[Aeronauts]

Apple could always build their own search engine to compete with Google and give us some genuine choice.

 

[Doomtomb]

Funny thing is, this money is about one single line in the Safari code.

nobody cares how much code is involved. They care about what it represents.

 

[lovehateapple]

What a waste of taxpayer money. DoJ goes after two companies that provide valuable products and services to people, meanwhile real criminals get blanket pardons.

 

[ifxf]

I wonder what the ROI on that $20B is, that's sick.

I switch everything to DuckDuckGo, honestly though I usually just ask GPT first now. I guess the next thing will be 'default LLM' for Apple Intelligence.

OpenAI will eventually need a return on investment for GPT, it is expensive to develop and maintain. Their investors will demand this. They can either do ad supported or a subscription model. DuckDuckGo has mostly chosen an ad model and they are not funded to the extent of OpenAI.

 

[SoldOnApple]

Funny thing is, this money is about one single line in the Safari code.

That's the genius of it. It's just sad that it means Apple is effectively selling user data just by funnelling people into Google services. I suppose if Google didn't, then Microsoft would. Imagine the foot in the door that would be for Microsoft, or anyone offering search and other services. Perhaps Google isn't so much paying to be the default search provider, they are actually paying to stay the default search provider in people's minds. If given a choice then most people would choose Google, but if Microsoft paid Apple $5 billion a year for Bing to be the default then over a few years millions of cashed up people could realise that Bing isn't so bad. It's easier than Google when using it for finding adult films too.

 

[svish]

Will be a huge loss for Apple as it will be losing a lot of money. Apple will desperately want to win this case. Will be interesting to see how this one will go.

 

[Cunir]

It always amazes me that Google can earn that kind of money back. It shows how much they make on ads

 

[delsoul]

Apple says they’re all about privacy, users rights, etc…should just make DuckDuckGo the default search engine on all of their devices.

 

[subjonas]

They could build a search engine that was actually privacy focussed rather than talking about privacy and then doing everything they can to defend the small fortune they make out of the Google surveillance machine.

Apple isn’t against tracking, they’re against secret tracking.

 

[Big_D]

Apple’s argument seems to be that they don’t want to lose income based on an illegal agreement… It was illegal, maybe they should just be happy that they don’t have to pay fines themselves or have to pay back the money Google gave them.

 

[dwaite]

That $20B is pure profit. There must be a default search engine, why not profit massively from it.

On the other hand, this is Apple's way to extort Google to stay out of the search business all the while Google gets to increase its search share.

You might be assuming Apple doesn't require every search provider to do revenue sharing in order to have direct OS integration. Also, AI engines like ChatGPT in the new Apple Intelligence world.

 

[Imperial926]

Here's the thing: If Apple's judgement is that Google is a good provider for search then just how far should we trust what they say about privacy, particularly with respect to AI?
Maybe as they already incorporate Open AI into the OS (optionally) they have prepared the ground for selling their principles down the line.

 

[justperry]

defaultSearchEngine = .google

Do you really think that’s it?!

How does Safari know what google is, safari has to know what a search engine is, it has to know what to do, where to look fo and so on.

So, no, it’s not as simple as that.

 

[surferfb]

Apple says they’re all about privacy, users rights, etc…should just make DuckDuckGo the default search engine on all of their devices.

There isn’t another option other than Google. DuckDuckGo’s results are clearly worse than Google’s AND on top of it, they couldn’t handle the traffic that being the default iOS and Mac search provider would bring. Bing is just a nonstarter. It has to be Google, and I’m sure it’ll be Google even if Google isn’t allowed to pay for it anymore.

Here's the thing: If Apple's judgement is that Google is a good provider for search then just how far should we trust what they say about privacy, particularly with respect to AI?
Maybe as they already incorporate Open AI into the OS (optionally) they have prepared the ground for selling their principles down the line.

I don’t like Google at all, and don’t use it but there’s no questioning they’re the best free search engine.

Can you imagine the blowback and clickbait headlines about Apple’s terrible search? Forum users hoping on here talking about how big bad Tim Cook is such a terrible CEO he can’t even pick the best search engine? It’d be Apple Maps x10.

 

[Andy_2341]

There isn’t another option other than Google. DuckDuckGo’s results are clearly worse than Google’s AND on top of it, they couldn’t handle the traffic that being the default iOS and Mac search provider would bring.

I haven’t used Google in over a year and much prefer the results I get from DuckDuckGo. You’re right about the load that would cause on DuckDuckGo though.

It has to be Google, and I’m sure it’ll be Google even if Google isn’t allowed to pay for it anymore.

Yep. Most people are happy with Google. Its just those of us that aren’t that change the browser default anyways, so the only real difference will be less money for Apple.

 

[surferfb]

I haven’t used Google in over a year and much prefer the results I get from DuckDuckGo. You’re right about the load that would cause on DuckDuckGo though.

Fair point, I haven’t used either in a long time, so DDG may have gotten better, but both times I tried to switch from Google to DDG I found myself using !g more often than not.

 

[Adora]

Fair point, I haven’t used either in a long time, so DDG may have gotten better, but both times I tried to switch from Google to DDG I found myself using !g more often than not.

Im am using DDG only since maybe 2012 and never missed anything. Maybe I switch to SearX or Presearch soon. Those should be better for more privacy and less censorship, if I don't confuse them with another one.

And I never use a Browser/Profile/TabContainer where I am logged in to YouTube for anything else.

 

[daabido]

Imagine if Apple put all that money to work or maybe even a fraction of it…

Siri would have brains; iOS, macOS, iPadOS, tvOS and all the other OS-es Apple will come up would be state of the art and stable available in all languages at the same time.

Their pro software like Final Cut Pro, motion, logic etc. would get regular updates and the choice for moviemakers.

Their consumer software like pages, numbers, keynote, iMovie would get regular updates and enjoy a greater audience.

It’s a pity Timmy is more focused on paying dividends to shareholders instead of making great products again.

Maintenance, incremental improvements and updates for niche software, is neither desirable to devs to be part of, or the company to make money. In an ideal world, yes, of course things could be massively improved, but Apple has a very, very, very long tradition of introducing new products and then abandoning their improvement.

New is sexy and make money. No one raced out to buy a Mac because of a point update in Pages.