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So is Google overpaying Apple just to keep opponents out or does Apple not believe it can seen search result ads as well as Google does?

salawat 3y ago
You're not seeing the problem right. As a society, we want businesses to do risky things to provide better goods/services/capabilities we did not have before. We never previously had the capability to index and search through the entirety of human knowledge effectively before. That's a game changer. The innovation and breakthroughs that could be fueled by that capability are near infinite in potential payoff. Yet... that system never happens, why? The answer is, profits/moneymaking usurped the original purpose of the corporation. Apple took the 20 billion because fuck yeah, no risk, and that becomes revenue stream. Progress toward organizing and making available human knowledge? 0. Google created an offering, then degraded it intentionally to preserve profit making over usability. The serving of ads, in short, is not the subject of which you should be asking. What you should be asking is "did Apple really think that they couldn't index and make available search results"? And even before you answer that, consider there is a heap of government and industry originated pressure to actually fundamentally degrade any project that actually does an honest to god indexing effort. By indexing I mean INDEXing. A purely reversible reflection of the net as is without any of type of policy mandated distortions like "don't surface classified material, extremist content, or other verboten material". Answer: We cannot have nice things. Why? Answer: Because everyone is to afraid of what would happen if we had nice things. Me included at some points. I've lived long enough to see first hand what assholes inevitably do after getting their hands on something nice. I'd love to take a stab at a distortionless index of the web. Given three years, a sufficient pool of hardware, and a ton of determination, I could probably whip up something reasonably great. I'd have to either keep it to myself, or have the wrath of policymakers rained down upon me for facilitating "terrorists, criminals, pirates, and sexual predators". Can't even try to reach beyond the bad to the good on the other side, because the tide of innovation lifts all boats, and there's a bunch of boats that seemingly no one wants lifted. So here we sit. A society stuck in the grip of collective push to keep ourselves ifnorant through intentional acts of informational partitioning when in reality, we have the technology to render any one person able to access the sum of human knowledge at any time. We could literally live post scarcity in terms of info-propagation. In reality, the only ones who do, are the very corporations, painstakingly building the apparatus to only go one-way, toward them, and no one else. And we only have ourselves to blame.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  But I don't understand it; if Google's search engine is superior to the other search engines why are they even paying $9bn each year to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices? Wouldn't otherwise, iOS users switch to Google immediately, if they like Google so much. And why Google instead of paying billions of dollars to Apple is not investing that $9bn each year in improving the quality of Google Search? It seems most likely to me that Google is a house of cards composed of Google Search, Google Chrome and Android and if you would pull one card out, the whole structure would collapse.
  - davidmargolin 3y ago
    for the same reason that advertisers bid for their own keyword searches even though Google would place their result at the top of the page anyways - because other companies will bid their way to the top otherwise.
  - simfree 3y ago
    Because Google knows it's search engine has degraded in quality over the years, and though Google Search might be better than alternatives that Apple could switch to, last time they had this fight (where Apple Maps became default) Google permanently lost 60% of their userbase on the platform to a lower quality competitor, a folly which they don't want to repeat. Maps is not profitable for Google or Apple, which is why they are willing to play games with it. Their experiences with Maps definitely inform future decisions though!

salawat 3y ago

You're not seeing the problem right. As a society, we want businesses to do risky things to provide better goods/services/capabilities we did not have before. We never previously had the capability to index and search through the entirety of human knowledge effectively before. That's a game changer. The innovation and breakthroughs that could be fueled by that capability are near infinite in potential payoff. Yet... that system never happens, why? The answer is, profits/moneymaking usurped the original purpose of the corporation. Apple took the 20 billion because fuck yeah, no risk, and that becomes revenue stream. Progress toward organizing and making available human knowledge? 0. Google created an offering, then degraded it intentionally to preserve profit making over usability. The serving of ads, in short, is not the subject of which you should be asking. What you should be asking is "did Apple really think that they couldn't index and make available search results"? And even before you answer that, consider there is a heap of government and industry originated pressure to actually fundamentally degrade any project that actually does an honest to god indexing effort. By indexing I mean INDEXing. A purely reversible reflection of the net as is without any of type of policy mandated distortions like "don't surface classified material, extremist content, or other verboten material". Answer: We cannot have nice things. Why? Answer: Because everyone is to afraid of what would happen if we had nice things. Me included at some points. I've lived long enough to see first hand what assholes inevitably do after getting their hands on something nice. I'd love to take a stab at a distortionless index of the web. Given three years, a sufficient pool of hardware, and a ton of determination, I could probably whip up something reasonably great. I'd have to either keep it to myself, or have the wrath of policymakers rained down upon me for facilitating "terrorists, criminals, pirates, and sexual predators". Can't even try to reach beyond the bad to the good on the other side, because the tide of innovation lifts all boats, and there's a bunch of boats that seemingly no one wants lifted. So here we sit. A society stuck in the grip of collective push to keep ourselves ifnorant through intentional acts of informational partitioning when in reality, we have the technology to render any one person able to access the sum of human knowledge at any time. We could literally live post scarcity in terms of info-propagation. In reality, the only ones who do, are the very corporations, painstakingly building the apparatus to only go one-way, toward them, and no one else. And we only have ourselves to blame.

mrkramer 3y ago
But I don't understand it; if Google's search engine is superior to the other search engines why are they even paying $9bn each year to Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices? Wouldn't otherwise, iOS users switch to Google immediately, if they like Google so much. And why Google instead of paying billions of dollars to Apple is not investing that $9bn each year in improving the quality of Google Search? It seems most likely to me that Google is a house of cards composed of Google Search, Google Chrome and Android and if you would pull one card out, the whole structure would collapse.
- davidmargolin 3y ago
  for the same reason that advertisers bid for their own keyword searches even though Google would place their result at the top of the page anyways - because other companies will bid their way to the top otherwise.
- simfree 3y ago
  Because Google knows it's search engine has degraded in quality over the years, and though Google Search might be better than alternatives that Apple could switch to, last time they had this fight (where Apple Maps became default) Google permanently lost 60% of their userbase on the platform to a lower quality competitor, a folly which they don't want to repeat. Maps is not profitable for Google or Apple, which is why they are willing to play games with it. Their experiences with Maps definitely inform future decisions though!