4 ms·

No price Microsoft could pay Apple to use Bing: Google antitrust ruling excerpts

85 points by rntn 2y ago

nullindividual 2y ago
If Apple could produce a high quality, privacy-minded search that respected common query operators, I'd jump for it. Unfortunately without robust ads, there's no money in it. Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google. Now that Bing belongs to the ad division, it's no better than Google search. Both platforms are defacto promoted ad engines with SEO gaming for results just beyond the ads. And I'm aware of Kagi, but it's not for the wide swaths of whatever can be indexed out there... it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s.
- criddell 2y ago
  There’s plenty of money in it. Even if the ads were minimally personalized (ie use location so that when I search for a plumber I see local plumbers) just the keyword-based ads would probably be enough to cover the costs. Apple users are exactly who advertisers want to reach. Apple has shown in the past that if something is considered a key technology, they would rather own it than hand that power to a key competitor. They made their own CPUs, they made Maps, and they could make search.
  - notaustinpowers 2y ago
    They can do it, but is it going to make them money? Google's $20b/year payment made up 20% of their income in 2023. 20% of their income was just free money, and their dev team doesn't have to do anything for them to get it. Would Apple or their shareholders accept a minimum 20% loss in income, plus whatever the expenses would be to build a Search and Ad platform, plus the continued expenses of maintaining and updating it?
    - criddell 2y ago
      Google is paying Apple $20 billion for $60 billion worth of traffic. Apple said it would cost $6 billion per year to build and run a search engine. I don't think it would take much of an ad platform to pull in enough money to make it work for Apple and their shareholders. It all comes down to whether or not Apple sees search as a key part of their phones and so far they haven't. FWIW, I think they're right - it's not a key part the same way Maps is, for example.
    - happyopossum 2y ago
      $100B was Apple's net income, not gross. Revenue was ~$400B, so we're talking about 5%, not 20.
      - notaustinpowers 2y ago
        Still, 20% of their net income is guaranteed free money. I doubt there are minimal (if any) expenses on Apple's side to maintain the status quo of Google being the default search engine.
- bawolff 2y ago
  > Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google. That is probably not enough though. Products that are just a little better than something that is good enough usually fail. I'm reminded of all the analysises of why plan 9 failed.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    network effects are strong. At a certain critical mass, only the company itself can detrhrone the company. Otherwise, people will mostly settle for the familiar over the true best.
    - bawolff 2y ago
      I think that is stateing it too far in the other direction. If you have a killer app, you can definitely dethrone the current king. I think it just has to be something much more significant than just marginal improvements.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        To be a bit more subtle: you can make a better competitor and be successful. But it's really hard to "dethrone the king" as you put it. Twitter is a great example of a social media actively destroying itself in ways that'd already put a medium sized business in the red, but its competiton as of now is far from a threat. Reddit as well, but there's not even a consensus best alternative there. Subtle point #2, this is mostly for the general consumer. You can and will piss off professionals or businesses to a point where you shoot yourself in the foot Unity was the most recent high-profile example, and Adobe is slowly losing doting over its issues.
    - tatersolid 2y ago
      Xerox, Hoover, Amana, IBM PCs, Scotch tape, and many other totally dominant brands have been successfully planted by moderately “better” competitors.
- tensor 2y ago
  Personally, I find it impossible to stomach continuing with ad-based models. I want zero ads in my life. Also, with newer AI the old search model is done for. Search will shift, should shift, to AI agents doing the search along with reading through various pages before giving accurate summaries with links. In that model users won't be exposed to ads as many searches won't even require them going to the end pages. Thus, there needs to be new models for how things work, both for end websites but also for search, models not based on ads.
  - falcolas 2y ago
    I agree with you about ads. But I couldn't disagree more about search. AI search is a lot like asking your friend. Your friend who relies on their memory and refuses to look things up online. Searching with AI requires too much brain power because you have to verify everything it gives you. Of course, that's becoming the case with ads embedded in the search results, too. Kinda bleak, really.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      Personally, I just don't trust anyone to summarize content for me. Call it my own weird quirks and biases, but I'm maybe 50/50 on conforming to populist sentiment, and if it's a story I even mildly care about I don't want to take that coin flip. I'll just take the time to at least skim the article, then read the abstract of any acedemic sources it points to.
    - tensor 2y ago
      The new generation of AI search will likely use traditional indexes or RAG followed by the AI reading the results to do higher level filtering. If you look at how search gpt, kagi experts, or the hugging face llm search works I think that will be the direction. Possibly even personalized agents could do this locally. You'll have to verify exactly as much as you do currently with old-style search, but ideally with much higher quality results and ranking, and no ads. For simpler things likely the answer will be directly trust worthy.
  - wood_spirit 2y ago
- emidln 2y ago
  One way you might fund a search engine is if you needed the index for some other busineds purpose (say, Siri). It will have a cost, but if you can defray the crawling and some processing cost, it becomes much easier to stomach without ads.
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  I honestly think a crypto-micropayment solution (a la brave) would be overall a net positive. An easy way with send pennies or less with virtually no overhead fees. It's shame though that crypto is to most people now, well, you know - crypto.
- jart 2y ago
  Paying for Kagi is worth it, just to have an LLM not pop up in my search results.
  - warkdarrior 2y ago
    Kagi is free, just need to create a new account every 100 searches.
    - CoastalCoder 2y ago
      Even if that's true, I wish you wouldn't do that. I'd really like for Kagi to be a success.
    - tazu 2y ago
      By doing that, you’re actively contributing to enshittification—you are the enshittifier.
  - athenot 2y ago
    And if you do want their LLM, just append a '?' character after your query. It's up to the users, not forced upon them.
  - layer8 2y ago
    For Google search you can add &udm=14 to the search URL to block the AI Overviews, or use verbatim search (tbs=li:1).
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  > it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s. No such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather pay to not have ads splashed in my face than have some corporation sell my data to the highest bidder. And an open source search engine isn't exactly a feasible endeavor (e.g. one that can be produced in 5-10 years without some reliance on existing tech). But I'd happily donate if anyone wants to take a gander at such an initiative.
- wenc 2y ago
  I paid for Kagi and used it for 3 months because the only way you could evaluate search is through “vibes”. I’m glad it benefits others but for me it was not much different from Google (with ad block). In two ways it was an inconvenience compared to Google — location search (Kagi respects privacy so it doesn’t do location, and its default maps are not as good — though google maps are one click away, it was an extra click each time.) searching for where to watch movies on streaming platforms was also missing so I had to do !g. I wish Kagi well — it’s by no means bad, in fact it’s an admirable product. But it wasn’t for me.
  - dmonitor 2y ago
    In my experience, if I want location results I just go directly to maps.google.com or the map app on my phone. Kagi was great because when I google "tacos" I usually just want recipes (or the wikipedia article), not the location of the taco bell down the street.
- gerash 2y ago
  Let's be concrete here. What's a "privacy minded" search engine exactly? Do you mean you don't want the search engine to correlate your query with what you clicked on? or any other feedback from user interactions to update its ranking? Good luck with that. Or do you want a free search engine without any ads ? You might as well wait for a company to send you money every week.
ralferoo 2y ago
> Apparently in 2020, Google conducted a study looking to see what would happen to its bottom line if it “were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product.” The conclusion was even if the company made search shittier, the revenues from Search would be fine. Just because they could, doesn't mean they should. But I guess they decided to anyway - it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results.
- xnx 2y ago
  > it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results. This has been a 20 year process with no single step-change. Ads used to be on he right side in colored boxes. Gradually, they started to appear above results and with no background color.
  - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
    I recall that someone made a compilation image showing the gradual progression from an obviously offset box (with a different design and solid colored background) to a design that's virtually identical to a search result other than the "Sponsored" label. Of course, I can't find it because search engines are garbage now.
    - xnx 2y ago
      Might be this? https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-bing-254332 https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog... Found it in the first page of results for "evolution of google search ads display"
      - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
        I'm pretty sure the one I'm thinking of was arranged differently and covered a slightly different time period, but that's close enough. My results might have been thrown off by my searches including "google ads", which is the name of the ad platform itself.
dagaci 2y ago
So .. we are ... saying ... gooole pays $20 billion cause yah know ... apple is cool.?? homage
hwbehrens 2y ago
Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results. But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all. The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments. Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.
- crowcroft 2y ago
  Here's a hypothetical I think about. Taking money out of the equation (or making the offer equal between Microsoft and Google), could Bing have improved to meet the quality of Google if it had all iOS users using it and providing usage data to improve the experience? How long would that take? I would assume the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is too long for Apple's liking.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240
ladzoppelin 2y ago
How is Googles CEO still there, I understand that changing CEO's does not magically change anything but this is getting ridiculous. Google has dramatically changed since he has been in charge, this might be the 4th crazy mind blowing incident that could possibly lead to their downfall but I have a bad memory.
iamleppert 2y ago
With that logic, one only has to look at the decline of the quality of Google Search results and ask yourself, why does Apple continue to endorse such a low quality product?
- jbverschoor 2y ago
  You think big is and has been for the past 15 years any better?
  - ericb 2y ago
    Assuming you meant bing, it is now better. For my last 3 programming problems, google wiffed, and bing had results that led to answers.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Do you search for programming problems on your iphone?
      - ericb 2y ago
        Very rarely. Better search is better search, though, and this is a good test.
- notaustinpowers 2y ago
  20% of your yearly income being guaranteed free money is a pretty big motivator.
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    5% - Apple's annual revenue is ~$400B
    - 3np 2y ago
      ~20% of profits, though. Regardless, I found the number staggeringly high.
eutropia 2y ago
The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet. I seem to recall so many commenters on HN whatabouting on the topic of advertising and privacy when it comes to iPhones versus android smartphones. Is that line item the justification for people to imagine, whole cloth, that Apple has an advertising incentive, and therefore is no better than Google? Wouldn't it be ironic for folks trying to equivocate Apple and Google's advertising agenda to find out that the only reason Apple has revenue from "advertising" is because Google pays them to? > The big DOJ antitrust trial over Google Search revealed last week that Big G pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search on iOS. That’s over 20 percent of the “services” revenue Tim Cook loves to talk about on earnings calls, but hey, where is all that money on the balance sheet? > BI’s Peter Kafka found out: Apple categorizes it as “advertising.” -- https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150326/well-thats-an-interesting-name-for-it https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150326/well-thats-an-int...
- jsnell 2y ago
  > The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet No it isn't. First, that's not what a balance sheet is. A balance sheet is the list of assets and liabilities. How those assets were gained isn't tracked. What you're thinking of is the income statement. Not understanding the difference is fine, but understanding the difference would have made it clear that your source is trash Second, there is no "advertising" line item in Apple's financials. Not in the balance sheet (where it would make no sense) nor in the income statement (it is under services, but not broken out further). The rest of your post is basically fanfic, since it is based on this invalid claim.
  - eutropia 2y ago
    I was hoping for this very response (one that bothered to fact check apple's released statements): yeah, balance sheet is the incorrect technical term. And yes, obviously they haven't broken it out beyond "services" income on an income statement -- otherwise it would have been news prior to the court fact findings becoming public record. > But each year, in Apple's annual report, when it breaks down each of its business lines, Apple does say: "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements." -- https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-search-services-filings-2024-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea... > Apple does have a traditional advertising business...$5.4 billion last year. That being said, what's fanfic about posing a question and proposing a hypothetical? My primary point is that there are so many adtech apologists looking to drag Apple's claims of privacy, user-focused into the same realm as the ad-surveillance business: wouldn't it be deeply ironic if the vast majority of that "advertising" business (roughly 80% of it) was just payments from the biggest adtech giant of all? Which is a conditional statement: IF(advertising=google money) -> ironic situation. IF we can trust the business insider reporter's reading of income statements: > "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements." Like renting out its search exclusivity to Google. Then it would be ironic indeed for people trying to paint them as no better than google. But my guess is that most people would just shrug and suggest that taking money for default search engine placement is the same as monetizing the entire web.
segasaturn 2y ago
Steve Jobs famously said Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste in design. I had the displeasure of having to use a fresh install of Windows 11 the other day and Bing without an adblocker was a complete horror show, big carousels of products and obvious ads at the top of the results screen you have to scroll past to see results, irrelevant news articles shoved in your face, the signal to noise ratio of Bing's search results page is abysmal. If Bing just copied the way Google's homepage and search results looked like in 2008 they would immediately start taking marketshare from Google.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  The best marketing move for Microsoft is to fire all their marketing people that touch Windows. An Operating System should be a tool, not a marketing destination. Get rid of all the useless telemetry that caused you to colossally ruin Windows 8 by removing the start menu button that "nobody used" and then "how do I turn off my computer" became the most looked up search term that year. Microsoft has great products, all ruined by marketing departments.
  - ganyu 2y ago
    Devs are forced to do something by the manager to please the skip manager. Teams do things the hard way to make it look as if they're actually doing things. Organizations hide from leadership what users really like lest the org got disassembled because they were creating literal crap. And leadership went to marketing team to cover this all up from the investors. Traders would buy in these stocks just because these big companies have good marketing to pretend they were making the right decisions. Most if not all big companies without tasteful people would eventually turn into monstrosities like this. Everyone were telling 'stories' around 'stories' that fold into a tangled web of everyone else, but sooner or later one day the bubble's going to pop, and down the stocks be gone. People with bad tastes aren't the worst to deal with. They have taste, it's just that it's different from others'. Tasteless people will do anything in their power to keep the wheels turning, and that means to let tasteful people surrounding them surrender their tastes, so everyone can and will become tasteless people who would do anything to keep the wheels turning.
stuff4ben 2y ago
I've been happily off Google Search for several years now and have enjoyed Duck Duck Go (Bing) ever since. Recently, the lack of Reddit posts in search results is disappointing, but not the end of the world. Wish I could move off GMail, but it's a bigger task. I've also been on Firefox for over 10 years now and don't miss Chrome at all. Google does some good things, but they lost my trust a long time ago.

85 points by rntn 2y ago

If Apple could produce a high quality, privacy-minded search that respected common query operators, I'd jump for it. Unfortunately without robust ads, there's no money in it. Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google. Now that Bing belongs to the ad division, it's no better than Google search. Both platforms are defacto promoted ad engines with SEO gaming for results just beyond the ads. And I'm aware of Kagi, but it's not for the wide swaths of whatever can be indexed out there... it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s.

criddell 2y ago
There’s plenty of money in it. Even if the ads were minimally personalized (ie use location so that when I search for a plumber I see local plumbers) just the keyword-based ads would probably be enough to cover the costs. Apple users are exactly who advertisers want to reach. Apple has shown in the past that if something is considered a key technology, they would rather own it than hand that power to a key competitor. They made their own CPUs, they made Maps, and they could make search.
- notaustinpowers 2y ago
  They can do it, but is it going to make them money? Google's $20b/year payment made up 20% of their income in 2023. 20% of their income was just free money, and their dev team doesn't have to do anything for them to get it. Would Apple or their shareholders accept a minimum 20% loss in income, plus whatever the expenses would be to build a Search and Ad platform, plus the continued expenses of maintaining and updating it?
  - criddell 2y ago
    Google is paying Apple $20 billion for $60 billion worth of traffic. Apple said it would cost $6 billion per year to build and run a search engine. I don't think it would take much of an ad platform to pull in enough money to make it work for Apple and their shareholders. It all comes down to whether or not Apple sees search as a key part of their phones and so far they haven't. FWIW, I think they're right - it's not a key part the same way Maps is, for example.
  - happyopossum 2y ago
    $100B was Apple's net income, not gross. Revenue was ~$400B, so we're talking about 5%, not 20.
    - notaustinpowers 2y ago
      Still, 20% of their net income is guaranteed free money. I doubt there are minimal (if any) expenses on Apple's side to maintain the status quo of Google being the default search engine.
bawolff 2y ago
> Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google. That is probably not enough though. Products that are just a little better than something that is good enough usually fail. I'm reminded of all the analysises of why plan 9 failed.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  network effects are strong. At a certain critical mass, only the company itself can detrhrone the company. Otherwise, people will mostly settle for the familiar over the true best.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    I think that is stateing it too far in the other direction. If you have a killer app, you can definitely dethrone the current king. I think it just has to be something much more significant than just marginal improvements.
    - johnnyanmac 2y ago
      To be a bit more subtle: you can make a better competitor and be successful. But it's really hard to "dethrone the king" as you put it. Twitter is a great example of a social media actively destroying itself in ways that'd already put a medium sized business in the red, but its competiton as of now is far from a threat. Reddit as well, but there's not even a consensus best alternative there. Subtle point #2, this is mostly for the general consumer. You can and will piss off professionals or businesses to a point where you shoot yourself in the foot Unity was the most recent high-profile example, and Adobe is slowly losing doting over its issues.
  - tatersolid 2y ago
    Xerox, Hoover, Amana, IBM PCs, Scotch tape, and many other totally dominant brands have been successfully planted by moderately “better” competitors.
tensor 2y ago
Personally, I find it impossible to stomach continuing with ad-based models. I want zero ads in my life. Also, with newer AI the old search model is done for. Search will shift, should shift, to AI agents doing the search along with reading through various pages before giving accurate summaries with links. In that model users won't be exposed to ads as many searches won't even require them going to the end pages. Thus, there needs to be new models for how things work, both for end websites but also for search, models not based on ads.
- falcolas 2y ago
  I agree with you about ads. But I couldn't disagree more about search. AI search is a lot like asking your friend. Your friend who relies on their memory and refuses to look things up online. Searching with AI requires too much brain power because you have to verify everything it gives you. Of course, that's becoming the case with ads embedded in the search results, too. Kinda bleak, really.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Personally, I just don't trust anyone to summarize content for me. Call it my own weird quirks and biases, but I'm maybe 50/50 on conforming to populist sentiment, and if it's a story I even mildly care about I don't want to take that coin flip. I'll just take the time to at least skim the article, then read the abstract of any acedemic sources it points to.
  - tensor 2y ago
    The new generation of AI search will likely use traditional indexes or RAG followed by the AI reading the results to do higher level filtering. If you look at how search gpt, kagi experts, or the hugging face llm search works I think that will be the direction. Possibly even personalized agents could do this locally. You'll have to verify exactly as much as you do currently with old-style search, but ideally with much higher quality results and ranking, and no ads. For simpler things likely the answer will be directly trust worthy.
- wood_spirit 2y ago
emidln 2y ago
One way you might fund a search engine is if you needed the index for some other busineds purpose (say, Siri). It will have a cost, but if you can defray the crawling and some processing cost, it becomes much easier to stomach without ads.
Workaccount2 2y ago
I honestly think a crypto-micropayment solution (a la brave) would be overall a net positive. An easy way with send pennies or less with virtually no overhead fees. It's shame though that crypto is to most people now, well, you know - crypto.
jart 2y ago
Paying for Kagi is worth it, just to have an LLM not pop up in my search results.
- warkdarrior 2y ago
  Kagi is free, just need to create a new account every 100 searches.
  - CoastalCoder 2y ago
    Even if that's true, I wish you wouldn't do that. I'd really like for Kagi to be a success.
  - tazu 2y ago
    By doing that, you’re actively contributing to enshittification—you are the enshittifier.
- athenot 2y ago
  And if you do want their LLM, just append a '?' character after your query. It's up to the users, not forced upon them.
- layer8 2y ago
  For Google search you can add &udm=14 to the search URL to block the AI Overviews, or use verbatim search (tbs=li:1).
johnnyanmac 2y ago
> it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s. No such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather pay to not have ads splashed in my face than have some corporation sell my data to the highest bidder. And an open source search engine isn't exactly a feasible endeavor (e.g. one that can be produced in 5-10 years without some reliance on existing tech). But I'd happily donate if anyone wants to take a gander at such an initiative.
wenc 2y ago
I paid for Kagi and used it for 3 months because the only way you could evaluate search is through “vibes”. I’m glad it benefits others but for me it was not much different from Google (with ad block). In two ways it was an inconvenience compared to Google — location search (Kagi respects privacy so it doesn’t do location, and its default maps are not as good — though google maps are one click away, it was an extra click each time.) searching for where to watch movies on streaming platforms was also missing so I had to do !g. I wish Kagi well — it’s by no means bad, in fact it’s an admirable product. But it wasn’t for me.
- dmonitor 2y ago
  In my experience, if I want location results I just go directly to maps.google.com or the map app on my phone. Kagi was great because when I google "tacos" I usually just want recipes (or the wikipedia article), not the location of the taco bell down the street.
gerash 2y ago
Let's be concrete here. What's a "privacy minded" search engine exactly? Do you mean you don't want the search engine to correlate your query with what you clicked on? or any other feedback from user interactions to update its ranking? Good luck with that. Or do you want a free search engine without any ads ? You might as well wait for a company to send you money every week.

ralferoo 2y ago

> Apparently in 2020, Google conducted a study looking to see what would happen to its bottom line if it “were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product.” The conclusion was even if the company made search shittier, the revenues from Search would be fine. Just because they could, doesn't mean they should. But I guess they decided to anyway - it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results.

xnx 2y ago
> it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results. This has been a 20 year process with no single step-change. Ads used to be on he right side in colored boxes. Gradually, they started to appear above results and with no background color.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  I recall that someone made a compilation image showing the gradual progression from an obviously offset box (with a different design and solid colored background) to a design that's virtually identical to a search result other than the "Sponsored" label. Of course, I can't find it because search engines are garbage now.
  - xnx 2y ago
    Might be this? https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-google-bing-254332 https://searchengineland.com/search-ad-labeling-history-goog... Found it in the first page of results for "evolution of google search ads display"
    - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure the one I'm thinking of was arranged differently and covered a slightly different time period, but that's close enough. My results might have been thrown off by my searches including "google ads", which is the name of the ad platform itself.

dagaci 2y ago

So .. we are ... saying ... gooole pays $20 billion cause yah know ... apple is cool.?? homage

hwbehrens 2y ago

Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results. But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all. The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments. Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.

crowcroft 2y ago
Here's a hypothetical I think about. Taking money out of the equation (or making the offer equal between Microsoft and Google), could Bing have improved to meet the quality of Google if it had all iOS users using it and providing usage data to improve the experience? How long would that take? I would assume the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is too long for Apple's liking.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

[dupe] More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41164240

ladzoppelin 2y ago

How is Googles CEO still there, I understand that changing CEO's does not magically change anything but this is getting ridiculous. Google has dramatically changed since he has been in charge, this might be the 4th crazy mind blowing incident that could possibly lead to their downfall but I have a bad memory.

iamleppert 2y ago

With that logic, one only has to look at the decline of the quality of Google Search results and ask yourself, why does Apple continue to endorse such a low quality product?

jbverschoor 2y ago
You think big is and has been for the past 15 years any better?
- ericb 2y ago
  Assuming you meant bing, it is now better. For my last 3 programming problems, google wiffed, and bing had results that led to answers.
  - Jensson 2y ago
    Do you search for programming problems on your iphone?
    - ericb 2y ago
      Very rarely. Better search is better search, though, and this is a good test.
notaustinpowers 2y ago
20% of your yearly income being guaranteed free money is a pretty big motivator.
- happyopossum 2y ago
  5% - Apple's annual revenue is ~$400B
  - 3np 2y ago
    ~20% of profits, though. Regardless, I found the number staggeringly high.

eutropia 2y ago

The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet. I seem to recall so many commenters on HN whatabouting on the topic of advertising and privacy when it comes to iPhones versus android smartphones. Is that line item the justification for people to imagine, whole cloth, that Apple has an advertising incentive, and therefore is no better than Google? Wouldn't it be ironic for folks trying to equivocate Apple and Google's advertising agenda to find out that the only reason Apple has revenue from "advertising" is because Google pays them to? > The big DOJ antitrust trial over Google Search revealed last week that Big G pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search on iOS. That’s over 20 percent of the “services” revenue Tim Cook loves to talk about on earnings calls, but hey, where is all that money on the balance sheet? > BI’s Peter Kafka found out: Apple categorizes it as “advertising.” -- https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150326/well-thats-an-interesting-name-for-it https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/6/24150326/well-thats-an-int...

jsnell 2y ago
> The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet No it isn't. First, that's not what a balance sheet is. A balance sheet is the list of assets and liabilities. How those assets were gained isn't tracked. What you're thinking of is the income statement. Not understanding the difference is fine, but understanding the difference would have made it clear that your source is trash Second, there is no "advertising" line item in Apple's financials. Not in the balance sheet (where it would make no sense) nor in the income statement (it is under services, but not broken out further). The rest of your post is basically fanfic, since it is based on this invalid claim.
- eutropia 2y ago
  I was hoping for this very response (one that bothered to fact check apple's released statements): yeah, balance sheet is the incorrect technical term. And yes, obviously they haven't broken it out beyond "services" income on an income statement -- otherwise it would have been news prior to the court fact findings becoming public record. > But each year, in Apple's annual report, when it breaks down each of its business lines, Apple does say: "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements." -- https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-search-services-filings-2024-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-advertising-google-sea... > Apple does have a traditional advertising business...$5.4 billion last year. That being said, what's fanfic about posing a question and proposing a hypothetical? My primary point is that there are so many adtech apologists looking to drag Apple's claims of privacy, user-focused into the same realm as the ad-surveillance business: wouldn't it be deeply ironic if the vast majority of that "advertising" business (roughly 80% of it) was just payments from the biggest adtech giant of all? Which is a conditional statement: IF(advertising=google money) -> ironic situation. IF we can trust the business insider reporter's reading of income statements: > "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements." Like renting out its search exclusivity to Google. Then it would be ironic indeed for people trying to paint them as no better than google. But my guess is that most people would just shrug and suggest that taking money for default search engine placement is the same as monetizing the entire web.

segasaturn 2y ago

Steve Jobs famously said Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste in design. I had the displeasure of having to use a fresh install of Windows 11 the other day and Bing without an adblocker was a complete horror show, big carousels of products and obvious ads at the top of the results screen you have to scroll past to see results, irrelevant news articles shoved in your face, the signal to noise ratio of Bing's search results page is abysmal. If Bing just copied the way Google's homepage and search results looked like in 2008 they would immediately start taking marketshare from Google.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
The best marketing move for Microsoft is to fire all their marketing people that touch Windows. An Operating System should be a tool, not a marketing destination. Get rid of all the useless telemetry that caused you to colossally ruin Windows 8 by removing the start menu button that "nobody used" and then "how do I turn off my computer" became the most looked up search term that year. Microsoft has great products, all ruined by marketing departments.
- ganyu 2y ago
  Devs are forced to do something by the manager to please the skip manager. Teams do things the hard way to make it look as if they're actually doing things. Organizations hide from leadership what users really like lest the org got disassembled because they were creating literal crap. And leadership went to marketing team to cover this all up from the investors. Traders would buy in these stocks just because these big companies have good marketing to pretend they were making the right decisions. Most if not all big companies without tasteful people would eventually turn into monstrosities like this. Everyone were telling 'stories' around 'stories' that fold into a tangled web of everyone else, but sooner or later one day the bubble's going to pop, and down the stocks be gone. People with bad tastes aren't the worst to deal with. They have taste, it's just that it's different from others'. Tasteless people will do anything in their power to keep the wheels turning, and that means to let tasteful people surrounding them surrender their tastes, so everyone can and will become tasteless people who would do anything to keep the wheels turning.

stuff4ben 2y ago

I've been happily off Google Search for several years now and have enjoyed Duck Duck Go (Bing) ever since. Recently, the lack of Reddit posts in search results is disappointing, but not the end of the world. Wish I could move off GMail, but it's a bigger task. I've also been on Firefox for over 10 years now and don't miss Chrome at all. Google does some good things, but they lost my trust a long time ago.