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Google paid $26.3B in 2021 to be the default search engine
- victorbjorklund 3y agoWay more than I would have guessed.
- iamgopal 3y agoThat means if I open more venue from which people conduct searches, Google will pay me to be default ? Like public computer kiosk ?
- hoten 3y agoAds are surely far less effective if a device doesn't have a single (or limited set) of users, so maybe not? No idea though.
- mdasen 3y agoIf you get popular enough, yes. For example, Apple has a lot of iPhone and Mac users and Google pays to be the default search via Apple's devices. If you build out public computer kiosks and people start using them a lot, Google would pay you to be the default search. I don't think you'd be able to get a lot of use out of such a business given that everyone has an smartphone in their pocket. But if you came up with some wearable tech that allowed people to conduct searches (and see Google's search ads), then Google would likely want to pay you to make their search the default instead of making a partnership with Bing or rolling your own search.
- bdcravens 3y agoPossibly, though you'd likely be including applications that already have those deals.
- gretch 3y agoYeah but in the course of doing so, you'd also have to a non-Google default search. If the hypothesis that Google is not better or indistinguishable from other search engines is true, then you'll be fine (or perhaps even better). But if it's not, then your whole business will have a drag force from that arbitrary friction (perhaps overcomable if the other parts of the business are great). If you rise up with Google as the default search and then threaten to switch away when you are big, then your threat won't have teeth because you risk too much inherently by potentially disrupting the experience of your customer base.
- amelius 3y ago> We knew Google paid handsomely to be the default browser in Safari, Firefox, and elsewhere. Now we know, after years of guessing, exactly what it cost. Browser?
- QuercusMax 3y agoGuess it's too much to ask for either basic proofreading, or basic knowledge of how the web works...
- bryan_w 3y agoIt's just representative of the news media these days
- londons_explore 3y agoTo you and I, The Internet, Chrome, Google, The World Wide Web and Broadband are all different words with different meanings. But to most of the rest of the population, they think "I got out my phone, I typed 'best headphones 2023' and bought the best one I could afford". Notice how they neither know nor care which browser they used, which search engine, which protocol, which website, etc. Those things are all irrelevant to what they were trying to do. It's our job as engineers to make sure everything just works and those people don't need to know or care.
- bostonpete 3y agoThis seems like a non sequitur -- the parent was just pointing out that the article's use of "browser" was probably a typo. In addition to being more correct using "search engine" or just "search" in place of "browser" would have made that sentence more accessible to the "rest of the population" you're describing.
- bsimpson 3y agoI know a designer who uses the Google app as her web browser on iOS.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoFor perspective, it would cost $20.4bn to provide every American with a Kagi starter account for a year [1]. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10 https://blog.kagi.com/unlimited-searches-for-10
- pixiemaster 3y agosorry to be bad about this, but why should „all americans“ be insightful, sufficient or relevant? that’s like a „libraries or congress“ scale. btw: Kagi is perfect!
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> why should „all americans“ be insightful, sufficient or relevant? It's an American antitrust action. The predominant recipient of Google's largesse, Apple, is an American company whose products are the predominant devices in America. Given all that, it's notable that Google is spending what is essentially a lower bound on Kagi's domestic TAM on keeping the likes of them down.
- djsavvy 3y agoHeads up that the link you sent seems to only work if you're already signed into Kagi.
- JumpCrisscross 3y agoThanks--fixed.
- daveguy 3y agoJust bit the bullet and paid for a kagi account 2 days ago. It is nice to have a simple, easily configured, non seo-borked, search engine again. I do worry if it becomes popular seo will start to target it. But at least my incentives align with kagi regarding seo, since I'm paying them rather than the advertisers.
- 3y ago
- crims0n 3y agoGoogle has to be sweating bullets... their main cash cow is slowly being replaced with GenAI.
- m3kw9 3y agoThey haven’t figured out how to monetize bard yet without pommeling their original search, so they are in a tight bind
- radlad 3y agoHow much does it cost to run a GenAI query? There's lots of investment money flowing into this right now, and companies seem to be using the classic "lose money until you gain market dominance" approach, but I wonder whether it's really sustainable in the long-term.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- okdood64 3y ago> is slowly being replaced with GenAI How so exactly?
- datameta 3y agoPeople are getting synthesized answers from LLMs that replace googling, filtering, and skimming for the info you need. Unless I misunderstand your question.
- m3kw9 3y agoI’m sure even if they break even it’s worth it because it keeps the ad inventory rolling and performing which means less for other competitors
- beej71 3y agoI shudder to think of what happens to Mozilla and Firefox if Google is banned from doing this.
- influx 3y agoIt's not like they are exactly thriving even with this...
- ecshafer 3y agoThey would probably need to get a new CEO...
- cubefox 3y agoYeah. Mitchell Baker collects a lot of money for having achieved nothing. They should bring back Brendan Eich as CEO. Of course that's unrealistic.
- arp242 3y agoEich went in his own direction with Brave; it's highly unlikely he's interested in coming back as he's got his own thing going, and it's not like he's somehow so uniquely gifted or talented that he's the only person that can lead Mozilla.
- cubefox 3y agoNot the only person, but it is hard to know whether someone can do it. Mitchell clearly couldn't, she lost to Chrome.
- neurostimulant 3y agoI see this "bring back Brendan Eich as Mozilla's CEO" from time to time. His tenure as Mozilla's CEO was just 11 days. Did he achieved something great in his 11 days of service to warrant this sentiment? I would at least understand if it's "bring back Brendan Eich as Mozilla's CTO" given his years of tenure as Mozilla's CTO.
- ianbutler 3y agoPaying to be the default is anti-competitive. Things like this, which directly and blatantly hinder competition, should be legislated away. I can conceive of a smaller but better product which just doesn't have the war chest to pay for positioning. That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user. That pretty clearly has the potential to harm consumers. You can argue "defaults can be changed", sure. However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't. The activation energy just isn't there for users to switch defaults, and they likely don't even know they can. Rarely are defaults left because they're just so darn good. I'd prefer things like this have a pop up during set up with a randomly ordered set of choices. To get on that list of choices might have a token fee (small sums of money are effective at weeding out garbage) required.
- ProfessorLayton 3y agoI'm not trying to justify this, but "pay for positioning" is everywhere, even your grocery store. I don't know that it's a good solution to legislate every little thing including positioning in a UI, but I do think we need to be much, much more aggressive than we are now at stopping monopolies and breaking up these megacorps.
- VikingCoder 3y agoPardon me - can I ask analogy to better understand your point of view? What kind of tires come on your Ford truck? If Ford chooses the "default" tires you get on your F-150... is that anti-competitive, for all other tire manufacturers? Must Ford give you the option which tires you want on your new F-150? Must they do it in a way that doesn't start with a "default"? Or is the problem not that Ford picks a tire manufacturer, but that the tire manufacturer cannot in your mind share the profits back with Ford?
- zht 3y agoNot the person you are responding to but I think it’s more like if Goodyear had 90 percent of the tire market and paid every single manufacturer to be the default tires. Sure consumers could choose but realistically most people go with the default. Makes it impossible for smaller incumbents to compete
- TradingPlaces 3y ago58% of traffic acquisition costs and 24% of all cost of revenue. Um, wow.
- pradn 3y agoWill the world be a better place if Google is banned from paying for default-privilege? Most users will probably switch to Google anyway, at least in the short term. Google will probably lose some market share. This means less revenue. However, the "cost of revenue" is lower as well. So it may just be a wash. When tobacco companies were banned from advertising, their big expense of advertising went down as well - and so profit rose. Google's long-term outlook looks murkier. It really is possible for new entrants to come in and steal market-share if they didn't have to pay for default-privilege. Platforms could encourage specialized search engines as well - pick one for shopping, another for maps, another for reviews - maybe we'll get a Cambrian explosion? But the fact that no ad-support search engine has been able to beat Google all these years, even Microsoft-supported Bing - means that internet search is fundamentally a hard problem to solve. It's also relatively capital intensive - all the hardware to crawl and index the web, human SERP raters and content moderators. As the internet becomes more and more hyper-commercialized, the value of a general purpose search-engine may decline. Why search when there's mostly garbage out there. Try going to any news website.
- soup10 3y agoNo, most people will use whatever the default is. The vast majority of search is for a few popular queries: facebook.com, wikipedia article, current event, celebrity, product etc. This isn't the 90s anymore where search engines were terrible and google was a big step up. Even among power users, the difference is not that clear.
- hughw 3y agoIs that true for Bing? Do most Windows users the default Edge and leave default search on Bing?
- bobthepanda 3y agoGoogle spends a lot of money on ads to get you off edge, and users are pretty much conditioned to ignore MS defaults. Before Chrome existed it was pretty common for people to suggest downloading FF out of hand. So the habit has existed for years, on top of the ad campaigns that Google runs for chrome.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoThe gist of their rebuttal is that people choose them because they are superior. If that's the case then why the $26.3B to be the default? IANAL but I don't think they've sufficiently answered this question.
- bad_user 3y agoBecause defaults matter for people that simply use what is given to them. Also, those payouts have addition benefits. Given the billions they give to Apple, I'm pretty sure that it prevents Apple from developing their own search engine, or from blocking ads in Safari by default. Same for Firefox. Google's Search is still the best, though. And I don't have any numbers, but I could bet that it's by far the most used search engine even on browsers that don't have it as a default (e.g., Vivaldi).
- VikingCoder 3y agoIANAL... but... isn't this Apple squeezing money out of Google? Blackmailing them that, if Google doesn't pay up, that Apple will give users a worse Search engine default, just out of spite? Apple has a walled garden. Isn't this Google paying to have their product billboard inside the wall? Why are we blaming Google for this?
- vb-8448 3y agoI think most people will just stick with the default option, very few people will change the search engine even if there is another one better. I remember the first years of chrome, people were using IE regardless of the fact that chrome was a superior browser. In general, I would prefer no default and the choice of the search engine be done by the user on the first access but, from the point of view of google, i think it's the best way for them to spend those moneys.
- isodev 3y agoI think there is an interesting aspect to this. By being the default search engine, Google also becomes the "universal" gateway to the web for every human with a connected device. Thanks to Chrome's market share, Google also has influence over web standards AND is able to essentially push whatever they want in their browser because they can. In other words, the World Wide Web is a Google Wide Web and $26.3B seems like a faire price.
- tantalor 3y agoTo be fair... that is essentially the company's mission statement: > Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. https://about.google/ https://about.google/
- bsimpson 3y agoThat was Facebook's strategy with Internet.org or whatever their free service for India/SE Asia was called - make "the Internet" mean "Facebook" for people who didn't have the internet yet. Kinda like what AOL was before ISPs were popular.
- drunner 3y agoUnrelated, is it possible to search the internet while ignoring content farms these days? Just trying to find information on any kind of consumer product is insanely difficult to do these days when there are thousands of "best 10 x" sites in the results.
- HideousKojima 3y agoI've seen a lot of people on here mention Kagi, a paid search engine that supposedly filters out results and makes search useful again etc. but no idea if anyone actually uses it and enjoys it or if they were just astroturfing shills.
- mog_dev 3y agoI've been a happy subscriber since the beginning. People have been talking about Kagi for a while. The devs have released a lot of figures on their blog blog.kagi.com and the feedback website is very active too. kagifeedback.org
- bwb 3y agoIve been using it for around 40 days to test. So far i like it, i do not notice much difference versus google in general. But i also got to bump quality sites in my niche up the listings (and reddit). So far i dig it
- rolisz 3y agoHappy paying user here. Managed to even convert some friends to it.
- dartos 3y agoI like it. It’s a little behind google sometimes like with very breaking news, but for most of my day to day it’s a massive improvement. The also display list articles separately from other sites, which is very refreshing
- babypuncher 3y ago
- ylere 3y agoThere were 4.9b internet users in 2021 [0]. Assuming a search market share of 90%, that's $5.9 per user and year - which seems a lot of considering it includes the developing world, but then of course Google's total ad revenue in 2021 was $209b ($47.3/user/yr) [1] globally and $61.2b in the US alone ($198.6/user/yr!!!) [0,2]. No other player has the ad revenue and market power to even attempt competing with Google: * Microsoft's search ads + LinkedIn revenue was only $18.7b [3] in 2021 (9% of Googles) and they are the only big global (i.e. not Chinese) player with ad revenues over $10b and a competing search engine. * Meta is the only company that comes closer in terms of ad revenue at $112b in 2021 (53% of Google) [4], but it's hard to imagine how they would fit search into their ecosystem. * Apple has the resources and controls the valuable (=mostly iOS users) Safari market, but even for them, they would have to forego $18b/year (as per the article) in pure profits from their deal with Google and manage to actually create a competing product and advertise it heavily, which would costs them 10s of billions a year more. It makes sense that they'd rather keep taking the cash instead. This also makes you realize just how valuable dominating the browser market with Google Chrome and having significant influence on the mobile market with Android must be for Google (and also why Apple doesn't allow third party browser engines on their platform). [0] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2021/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/facts-figures-2... [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-revenue-of-google/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266249/advertising-reven... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-revenue-usa/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/469821/google-annual-ad-... [3] https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html https://www.microsoft.com/investor/reports/ar21/index.html [4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-advertising-revenue-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271258/facebooks-adverti...
- voisin 3y ago> This also makes you realize just how valuable dominating the browser market with Google Chrome and having significant influence on the mobile market with Android must be for Google (and also why Apple doesn't allow third party browser engines on their platform). And manipulate the AdWords auction market that they control.
- kyle-rb 3y ago
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: Google's plan to stop Apple from getting serious about search - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023874 - Oct 2023 (269 comments)
- pr337h4m 3y agoThe power of defaults is heavily overrated: https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-windows-10-google-chrome-fight https://www.theverge.com/23935029/microsoft-edge-forced-wind...
- jader201 3y agoI’d argue these are very different, for at least two reasons: 1. This is comparing desktops/laptops to phones. Way more people have phones than computers, and most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default. 2. This is comparing a browser to a search engine. More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine. Obviously this is speculation, but it seems like pretty reasonable speculation, particularly the first point.
- bobthepanda 3y agoChrome also did a lot of legwork showing people how to change desktop browsers, taking out ads not only on their massive ads platform and online properties but on billboards, tv ads. etc. No mobile search has launched anything nearly as comprehensive, probably because it would cost so much.
- pr337h4m 3y ago>More people are going to notice they’re using a different browser vs. using a different search engine. Chromium Edge and Chrome have pretty much identical UI/UX. If you switch between Google and Bing, you will immediately notice the difference. >most people that have phones and not computers probably don’t realize or know how they can change the default. "80.12% of iOS users, used Safari as their default browser as of 2020." Source: https://zipdo.co/statistics/apple-safari/ https://zipdo.co/statistics/apple-safari/ About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood.
- jader201 3y ago> If you switch between Google and Bing, you will immediately notice the difference. Again, I'd argue that this may not be true for a lot of people. And even if they notice the difference, I'm not sure that a) they'd care, or b) they'd know how to do anything about it. My wife/mom would probably ask me how to change their browser back, if the UX is different enough that they couldn't find their way around (but if not, then they won't care about that either). But they're not going to care to change the default browser back, as the UX difference between the two has a much smaller gap. Only the results are different, if they may not even notice that. > About 20% of users changing the default browser is a big deal, especially when all browsers are identical (WebKit) under the hood. But this means that 80% users stick to the default (in this specific case). If these are users that don't care or don't know how to change the default, then the defaults matter more than the OP (and the linked article) suggest. And 80% is a much bigger deal than 20%.
- partiallypro 3y agoThey aren't just paying for the acquisition of customers; they are paying a competitor to not enter the market by making it not palpable financially for them to do so. That gives them a lot more market power and allows them to increase ad pricing, etc.
- lamontcg 3y agoI wonder if this détente all falls apart once the EU cracks open iOS so that Google can ship a Chrome that isn't a Safari skin... At this point I'd like to see Apple get into search, but if that also gets them knee-deep into advertisement then I worry about them becoming just another Google.
- mediumsmart 3y agodefault, maybe. but search engine? please.
- Gud 3y agoI made the switch to Kagi some time ago and I couldn’t be happier. If you haven’t already, do it! Kagi is fantastic! I wish Apple would switch the default to Kagi, if they are as serious about privacy as they claim they will.
- grandinj 3y agoLet’s call this what it is - a kickback for helping to maintain a monopoly