39 ms·

Many of the users will change default to google anyways. And I think it might even hurt apple a little to not use google as default search engine.

majani 9y ago
You're greatly overestimating the number of users who change defaults in their software. It would be a huge hit to Google's mobile efforts for sure.
- EduardoBautista 9y ago
  Google is orders of magnitude better than their competition in search. Apple's customers will be sure to complain if they default to any other search engine.
  - jbverschoor 9y ago
    I don't think that's the case anymore these days
    - azakai 9y ago
      I agree. I've used Bing for a long time now, starting as an experiment to see how big the difference was. In practice the difference is very small, although once a week or so I'll need to use Google to search for something.
    - Fomite 9y ago
      I have one computer that has Bing as the default search, and the results are continually painfully worse than Google.
  - plussed_reader 9y ago
    OP:"Google is orders of magnitude better than their competition in search." Sure, so long as we agree the search results are relevant.
    - thephyber 9y ago
      There are entire industries of the internet economy that disagree with you.
  - Tanegashima 9y ago
    Apple users won’t complain, sure there will be a lot of fake iHater complaints on the web, but you can choose your search engine provider on iOS and anyone smart enough to be bothered, will be smart enough to change the search provider.
  - goialoq 9y ago
    Firefox users didn't complain. Apple users don't complain that the default Maps app is Apple Maps, despite Apple Maps being a famous punchline.
    - cptskippy 9y ago
      I did. I think it should ask you upon clean install. Even the UI for changing search engines is cumbersome.
    - likelynew 9y ago
      I don't know what your measure of complaining is, but it generated enough criticism to allow google maps in the app store. I will be happier if the default is google maps and I think many share this feeling.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Mark me down as one who hates it defaulting to Apple's maps. On the older iPad, you could not even use the web version go Google Maps. Horrible!
  - skewart 9y ago
    I strongly disagree. I switched to Duck Duck Go about six months ago and haven't missed Google at all. Maybe Google was much better at some point in time in the past, but I haven't noticed any meaningful difference these days. Google's advantage is their massive brand awareness. They've done an outstanding job with brand marketing - positioning themselves as smart and nerdy, so people are inclined to subconsciously think of them as highly performant, even without any evidence to back it up.
    - malnourish 9y ago
      I have DDG as my default, but I append !g any time I am looking for something local. DDG obviously can't (and shouldn't!) compete there.
  - aclsid 9y ago
    I have made a conscious effort to avoid Google products as much as I could for some time, part social experiment, but also because I could use Bing without having to use a VPN while living in China. My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product. And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
    - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
      While working for Microsoft china, I would use Google at work at Bing at home... Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
      - aclsid 9y ago
        I should point out that Baidu is good for China IF you are searching the Chinese internet. Which means writing stuff in pinyin or Chinese characters. It is pretty cool how it deals with pinyin though. Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.
  - fwdpropaganda 9y ago
    Absolute bullshit. I've been using Bing for about a year now and it's almost indistinguishable from Google. Google seems to be better at heavily semantic queries. For example, just recently I tried "that picture where capitalism is represented as a giant octopus". Bing didn't have the picture I wanted on the first page. Google did but wasn't the first hit. But for 99.9% of the queries, if you say Google is "order of magnitude better", you're talking out of your ass and my suspicion is you haven't even bothered trying anything else in at least 5 years.
  - hobarrera 9y ago
    I completely disagree. DDG's results have been better than google's for years now. From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
  - hobarrera 9y ago
    I completely disagree. DDG's results have been better than google's for years now. From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
- johnsmith21006 9y ago
  Look at what happened when Firefox switched default search. The default search on Firefox is now worth far less than it was before as they lost huge amounts of browser market share. Bing is down to 2.5% market share , global and all platforms. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search engine market share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats Down to 6.5% in the US for all platforms. But is also declining. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-states-of-america http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni... Plus Bing having so little share and revs to invest it has really fallen behind Google in particular in Mobile.
  - thephyber 9y ago
    That's $correlation !== $causation. You can't for sure isolate "default search engine" as the only variable (because it wasn't), but I'm sure it was a significant driver. Remember that Google was pushing performance, had a massive install base and marketing budget during those years. There is a huge amount of friction added to a system (in this case, the browser-web ecosystem) when a major change like the default search engine is changed. The aggregation of all frictions is what causes users to alter their behavior or seek other solutions to reduce that friction. If iOS were to switch, some users would figure out how to change their default setting, others would simply see an increase in frustration with "the product" (meaning iOS + web search). It is likely to cause some migration, but probably not a significant amount until and unless other frictions are added.
- bluedino 9y ago
  I've long quit being surprised at default search results coming up through Bing/Yahoo these days. Shocker at first, though.
- notgood 9y ago
  Completely false; there is a reason almost no-body uses Microsoft Edge while the majority prefers Chrome. I'm 100% sure the top search query in any other search engine they place by default would be "google".
  - Const-me 9y ago
    > there is a reason almost no-body uses Microsoft Edge while the majority prefers Chrome. I think #1 reason is aggressive marketing. I’ve been using MS Edge for a couple of years. Works OK, the only minor issue was annoying popups on e.g. youtube advertising Chrome. Fortunately, adblock worked.
    - notgood 9y ago
      Not really, the #1 reason is that came out at a time the most common explorer was IE8, and IE9 which was an improvement over 8 but still slow and clunky as hell (and no ad-blocking). The story would be different if Edge had existed back then, but then again Edge exists as a response to Chrome (before Chrome, browsers didn't even auto-update silently)

majani 9y ago

You're greatly overestimating the number of users who change defaults in their software. It would be a huge hit to Google's mobile efforts for sure.

EduardoBautista 9y ago
Google is orders of magnitude better than their competition in search. Apple's customers will be sure to complain if they default to any other search engine.
- jbverschoor 9y ago
  I don't think that's the case anymore these days
  - azakai 9y ago
    I agree. I've used Bing for a long time now, starting as an experiment to see how big the difference was. In practice the difference is very small, although once a week or so I'll need to use Google to search for something.
  - Fomite 9y ago
    I have one computer that has Bing as the default search, and the results are continually painfully worse than Google.
- plussed_reader 9y ago
  OP:"Google is orders of magnitude better than their competition in search." Sure, so long as we agree the search results are relevant.
  - thephyber 9y ago
    There are entire industries of the internet economy that disagree with you.
- Tanegashima 9y ago
  Apple users won’t complain, sure there will be a lot of fake iHater complaints on the web, but you can choose your search engine provider on iOS and anyone smart enough to be bothered, will be smart enough to change the search provider.
- goialoq 9y ago
  Firefox users didn't complain. Apple users don't complain that the default Maps app is Apple Maps, despite Apple Maps being a famous punchline.
  - cptskippy 9y ago
    I did. I think it should ask you upon clean install. Even the UI for changing search engines is cumbersome.
  - likelynew 9y ago
    I don't know what your measure of complaining is, but it generated enough criticism to allow google maps in the app store. I will be happier if the default is google maps and I think many share this feeling.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Mark me down as one who hates it defaulting to Apple's maps. On the older iPad, you could not even use the web version go Google Maps. Horrible!
- skewart 9y ago
  I strongly disagree. I switched to Duck Duck Go about six months ago and haven't missed Google at all. Maybe Google was much better at some point in time in the past, but I haven't noticed any meaningful difference these days. Google's advantage is their massive brand awareness. They've done an outstanding job with brand marketing - positioning themselves as smart and nerdy, so people are inclined to subconsciously think of them as highly performant, even without any evidence to back it up.
  - malnourish 9y ago
    I have DDG as my default, but I append !g any time I am looking for something local. DDG obviously can't (and shouldn't!) compete there.
- aclsid 9y ago
  I have made a conscious effort to avoid Google products as much as I could for some time, part social experiment, but also because I could use Bing without having to use a VPN while living in China. My personal results are that you can totally ditch Google Search, Gmail, etc, and no, Google stuff is not orders of magnitude better. Nowadays, living outside the GFW again, I switch freely between Bing and DuckDuckGo, but it will always be a pain in the ass not having access to Youtube. That, imho, is Google's killer product. And then you have things like Yandex which is a tad better than Google in Russia and Baidu which does the same in China (compared to Google HK)
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    While working for Microsoft china, I would use Google at work at Bing at home... Baidu is never good, every search I do there seems to turn up mostly porn (and I'm far from searching for porn).
    - aclsid 9y ago
      I should point out that Baidu is good for China IF you are searching the Chinese internet. Which means writing stuff in pinyin or Chinese characters. It is pretty cool how it deals with pinyin though. Plus the other benefit of Baidu is that unlike Bing, where you would get a whole bunch of results, only to find that the page was blocked in China for one reason or another, Baidu allowed you to actually work without too much hassle inside that ridiculous censorship system.
- fwdpropaganda 9y ago
  Absolute bullshit. I've been using Bing for about a year now and it's almost indistinguishable from Google. Google seems to be better at heavily semantic queries. For example, just recently I tried "that picture where capitalism is represented as a giant octopus". Bing didn't have the picture I wanted on the first page. Google did but wasn't the first hit. But for 99.9% of the queries, if you say Google is "order of magnitude better", you're talking out of your ass and my suspicion is you haven't even bothered trying anything else in at least 5 years.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  I completely disagree. DDG's results have been better than google's for years now. From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
- hobarrera 9y ago
  I completely disagree. DDG's results have been better than google's for years now. From time to time I sit next to a friend or coworker and watch then trying to google something. I DDG looking for the same information and it's usually amongst the first few results. (for anything non-trivial, of course, for trivial things, any search engine works).
johnsmith21006 9y ago
Look at what happened when Firefox switched default search. The default search on Firefox is now worth far less than it was before as they lost huge amounts of browser market share. Bing is down to 2.5% market share , global and all platforms. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share Search engine market share Worldwide | StatCounter Global Stats Down to 6.5% in the US for all platforms. But is also declining. http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/united-states-of-america http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/uni... Plus Bing having so little share and revs to invest it has really fallen behind Google in particular in Mobile.
- thephyber 9y ago
  That's $correlation !== $causation. You can't for sure isolate "default search engine" as the only variable (because it wasn't), but I'm sure it was a significant driver. Remember that Google was pushing performance, had a massive install base and marketing budget during those years. There is a huge amount of friction added to a system (in this case, the browser-web ecosystem) when a major change like the default search engine is changed. The aggregation of all frictions is what causes users to alter their behavior or seek other solutions to reduce that friction. If iOS were to switch, some users would figure out how to change their default setting, others would simply see an increase in frustration with "the product" (meaning iOS + web search). It is likely to cause some migration, but probably not a significant amount until and unless other frictions are added.
bluedino 9y ago
I've long quit being surprised at default search results coming up through Bing/Yahoo these days. Shocker at first, though.
notgood 9y ago
Completely false; there is a reason almost no-body uses Microsoft Edge while the majority prefers Chrome. I'm 100% sure the top search query in any other search engine they place by default would be "google".
- Const-me 9y ago
  > there is a reason almost no-body uses Microsoft Edge while the majority prefers Chrome. I think #1 reason is aggressive marketing. I’ve been using MS Edge for a couple of years. Works OK, the only minor issue was annoying popups on e.g. youtube advertising Chrome. Fortunately, adblock worked.
  - notgood 9y ago
    Not really, the #1 reason is that came out at a time the most common explorer was IE8, and IE9 which was an improvement over 8 but still slow and clunky as hell (and no ad-blocking). The story would be different if Edge had existed back then, but then again Edge exists as a response to Chrome (before Chrome, browsers didn't even auto-update silently)