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I wonder how worse it'll play out if Google pulled the plug and stopped paying these fees. These companies would be left with nothing but inferior alternatives

I wonder how worse it'll play out if Google pulled the plug and stopped paying these fees. These companies would be left with nothing but inferior alternatives (Bing, Yahoo, maybe DDG?). Mozilla tried this by cutting out Google for its default search engine and I don't think it made any meaningful difference. I think, in a certain sense, Google is a risk-averse company. It simply won't gamble with its user base, no matter how high the costs are. Considering the cash arsenal the company has, I don't think it's a bad use of capital for Google.

tryingagainbro 9y ago
>>Google is a risk-averse company. It simply won't gamble with its user base, no matter how high the costs are. Considering the cash arsenal the company has, I don't think it's a bad use of capital for Google. If ain't broken...plus who knows, MS or Apple might just jump in and the they do have the cash. Would you want to be the Google exec that started the downfall? Frankly even a nice chunk of Android development is a sort of traffic acquisition (Search bar for one.)
bitmapbrother 9y ago
>Mozilla tried this by cutting out Google for its default search engine Did Mozilla really cut out Google or did Google not want to renew the deal after it expired?
- kibwen 9y ago
  Word on the street is that Meyer was desperate enough for market share that they actually outbid Google for the Firefox deal. I think Mozilla is supposed to publicly release financial data every three years, and the last time was 2014, so we might know for certain soon.
ForHackernews 9y ago
Bing isn't that inferior these days. Arguably their video search is better than Google's. Their main search results are plenty good enough for most normal use cases.
Eridrus 9y ago
I found some statistics a while ago that seemed to indicate a big chunk of Firefox users who got Yahoo as the default, kept Yahoo as the default.
- kibwen 9y ago
  My own anecdote: when Yahoo became the default for Firefox, the drop in quality was noticeable, but not enough for me to abandon it immediately. I gave it time to see whether the difference in quality was only because of the extensive profile that Google has on me. After a while I stopped realizing that the search results weren't Google (it helps that Yahoo revamped their results page to imitate Google, which was probably a very wise decision); it turns out, that for most of my searches, Google-level quality doesn't matter (e.g. "apple turnover recipe"). I switched from Yahoo to Bing once the Verizon buyout began. Nowadays I only search Google when I need to find an obscure and specific page that isn't already in my browser history (since Firefox's history search via the URL bar is damn good).

tryingagainbro 9y ago

>>Google is a risk-averse company. It simply won't gamble with its user base, no matter how high the costs are. Considering the cash arsenal the company has, I don't think it's a bad use of capital for Google. If ain't broken...plus who knows, MS or Apple might just jump in and the they do have the cash. Would you want to be the Google exec that started the downfall? Frankly even a nice chunk of Android development is a sort of traffic acquisition (Search bar for one.)

bitmapbrother 9y ago

>Mozilla tried this by cutting out Google for its default search engine Did Mozilla really cut out Google or did Google not want to renew the deal after it expired?

kibwen 9y ago
Word on the street is that Meyer was desperate enough for market share that they actually outbid Google for the Firefox deal. I think Mozilla is supposed to publicly release financial data every three years, and the last time was 2014, so we might know for certain soon.

ForHackernews 9y ago

Bing isn't that inferior these days. Arguably their video search is better than Google's. Their main search results are plenty good enough for most normal use cases.

Eridrus 9y ago

I found some statistics a while ago that seemed to indicate a big chunk of Firefox users who got Yahoo as the default, kept Yahoo as the default.

kibwen 9y ago
My own anecdote: when Yahoo became the default for Firefox, the drop in quality was noticeable, but not enough for me to abandon it immediately. I gave it time to see whether the difference in quality was only because of the extensive profile that Google has on me. After a while I stopped realizing that the search results weren't Google (it helps that Yahoo revamped their results page to imitate Google, which was probably a very wise decision); it turns out, that for most of my searches, Google-level quality doesn't matter (e.g. "apple turnover recipe"). I switched from Yahoo to Bing once the Verizon buyout began. Nowadays I only search Google when I need to find an obscure and specific page that isn't already in my browser history (since Firefox's history search via the URL bar is damn good).