3 ms·
> I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine. I'd be surprised if one of the conditions for the lucrativeness of this payment is pa
by mythz 6y ago
> I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine.
I'd be surprised if one of the conditions for the lucrativeness of this payment is paying Apple to not compete in Google's bread & butter, which is why I don't see there's any risk that Google would stop paying for placement whilst iOS maintains its valuable user base.
If they do decide to pull the plug Apple can always acquire DDG and give themselves a head start to building a competitor.
- sidibe 6y agoAcquiring DDG wouldn't give them much of a head start as its value is mostly anonymizing Bing searches. Apple could just work out a deal directly with Microsoft instead.
- mythz 6y agoThey'd acquire DDG if they wanted a jump start into creating their own search technology. DDG does have a DuckDuckBot crawler & obviously lots of staff & expertise in the area (Apple more acqui-hires than anything else). I don't know of a more appropriate Search company they could acquire to give them a headstart given Bing isn't for sale & MSFT is non acquirable. If Google did decide to drop the payment they'd most definitely turn & collect placement checks from Bing as their first recourse, but if they wanted to build their own search technology they wouldn't be sourcing their results from Bing, they'd want to make sure they're masters of their own fate and own (or license) the technology & expertise themselves like they're doing with Apple Maps. But I don't see any of this happening, the placement payments benefits both Companies.