Will 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.
No, 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.
Google 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.
There 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).
> 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.
I don't think Google has 90% of the world's search market share. In the west, I'd say that's about correct, but not in China. Baidu takes a big chunk of that and China has a large population. Unless a really small fraction of China uses search engines, I don't see how Google can be at 90% globally.
Edit: Apparently 840 million Chinese use search engines[0] and at least 70% use Baidu[1] which would be 588 million so something like 12% out of those 4.9 billion people. Not sure why the stats aren't reflecting the Chinese population when they claim to be global.
You're probably right, and this underscores the point even more as it means it pays even more than $5.90/user/year, and gets even more ad revenue than $47.30/user/year.
It's probably challenging to get good data on actual search engine market share in China. A bit surprising that this is not properly taken into account for the global stats.
Apple doesn't allow 3rd party engines on iOS because if they let web apps get too capable then people will stop paying a 30% premium for App Store apps.
Apple is quite fine with people making web apps, and have been expanding Safari's capabilities to support them. In the latest major iOS, PWAs can now even send push notifications to the user.
Partly because for a long time Android allowed apps to do their own billing for subscriptions and other IAP, as long as the content you purchased could be accessed on other platforms (with a big carveout for games, which always had to use Play Store billing for IAP). That's why Spotify railed against Apple for years but didn't mention Google.
They changed their rules a couple years ago to make it pretty much consistent with Apple's policies, but I think some of the bigger players got exceptions.
I switched from Chrome to Firefox on mobile because it can install arbitrary browser extensions (with a workaround).
Like the one that automatically applies dark mode to websites (even those that do not normally support it, like Hacker News) if the phone is in dark mode. Or the one that stops videos from playing by themselves. Or, I hate to admit, AdBlock.
Firefox needs to make Profiles a first class UI function. Yes, I understand that Firefox has containers, but I loath explaining containers to non-technical people. Chrome and Safari Profiles are much easier to use.
I 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.
Eich 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.
Paying 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.
> 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.
I don't know how you write this law.
- Are you compelling OS makers to present arbitrary options for various types of application? For search only? If so, why? If not, where does it end? How do you weigh this against free speech concerns in the relevant jurisdictions?
- Why would it only apply to search providers and operating systems? Paying for positioning happens in many, many places. Would we not also need to outlaw sponsorships and exclusivity deals such as "$BRAND_NAME - the official beer of $SPORTS_ARENA"? You can't bring outside beverages in, so you're limited to "the default".
Agree. Coming up with a piece of legislation that actually works seems impossible. There are a zillion commercial agreements around distribution, exclusivity etc and a lot of business doesn't work without it.
"Get rid of all of it"? Here's the thing, laws don't remove bad things from society, they add constraints on the bad things and penalties for violating the constraints.
So you're not proposing getting rid of something (which sounds so nice and simple!), you're proposing creating new restrictions on what businesses can do. Those restrictions have to be defined in a clear, unambiguous way to avoid challenges in court.
I'm saying there's probably no version of your hypothetical law that would stand up in court (not to mention pass a legislature).
To your point of consumer harm, businesses have rights (varying by the law of the land) that must be balanced against consumer rights.
I'm being a little more devil's advocate here and playing fast with some of the practical realities than I might personally hold as an actual opinion so keep that in mind, but:
A business should always be subservient to the general citizens who will make up said business. Following that, consumer rights (citizen rights) should always be promoted over the rights of a business. So I don't know that I take your point about balancing those two things. They seem like separate classes of rights with one that is more important. I guess that's technically still balancing, but in a way that business always loses.
As to writing a law to stand up to scrutiny. I don't know that I have to care about that. That's not my problem to deal with, that's our legislators problem. In fact that should be one of their primary problems, writing laws that stand up to scrutiny that protect abuse of general citizens.
It seems more like a lack of will, which I could speculate on.
Edit: I'll say this, as something reflecting my actual opinion. I tend to agree that this has a high degree of complexity and applying a flippant indiscriminate legislation to ban this won't work and won't stand up to legal scrutiny, though I get the sense you know a lot more about why than I do. That said, I do think we can do better, and if you work backwards from an impossibly high ideal, with a lot of time and effort someone can land on a solution that's better than nothing. I don't think that's impossible. I don't think legislation is necessarily the right way to go about it. I was hesitant to add that part to my initial post but went with it anyway. It isn't aligned entirely with my own beliefs about competition, even though I think the practice of pay for play is kind of gross, and imbalanced and doesn't reflect a superior product.
My sibling comment here is right, businesses are more like people than you are allowing, at least when it comes to protection from government interference.
It's easy to fall into a trap where "business" === "huge rich company", but it's just not that simple.
You say it's a lack of will, but I really don't buy that most people hold your position that anything resembling an exclusive arrangement like we've been talking about should be illegal. Personally I absolutely don't support that sort of blanket rule.
That's fair, I don't even hold my own opinion. I like talking about extremes in so much as what I learn from other people and by looking at the thread it seems to have done the job. You have the benefit of not knowing me, but I suspect if you'd ask one of my friends this entire thread is almost distinctly the opposite of my view on business and legislation.
The businesses are legal fictions which are owned by humans and run by humans. In practice, it's just a group of humans. So any time you assume you are putting the rights of citizens ahead of businesses, you are putting the rights of one set of humans over another set.
It's never simple. It's really hard (/impossible) to come up with good legislation. Much of it creates weird incentives or high costs to enforce or high costs to doing business which are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices and citizens in the form of lower dividend checks in retirement.
Saying "it's not my problem" amounts to "i have no idea how to solve this".
You're right I have no idea how to solve this very large problem in society, I'm flattered that you expected me to. Though I'm not sure in reality I have the responsibility to know the answer to any large problems like this. I don't know much about anything really. I can still express the problem however.
I expect my representatives who I do vote for to know answers like this though and that's not unreasonable, its one of the basis of our current system in fact.
Representatives aren't magicians. If you can't do it, they probably can't. It might be terrifying, but it's true. Representatives being able to do things you can't is not the basis for a political system.
Outside of my above hyperbolics that I was pushing for the sake of discussion:
That doesn't terrify me, it makes me question why have them then? I don't need a paper pusher with a loud voice, I want leaders who can solve problems their constituents think are important and take on responsibility of figuring these things out.
If you gave me time to devote to it, a staff, authority, and the right bipartisanship climate I could figure it out.
I don't have an answer, because I spent less than an hour thinking about this problem, and most of that hour was spent starting to understand the nuances involved from a half assed answer I threw out into the void because I could and I was curious to see what people would say, not because I couldn't arrive at an actual solution given the time and resources. I remain convinced this problem is tractable even if its not through legislative means.
I'm not invested in this problem enough to take action though, I'd rather go back to working on my side projects. I am however, invested enough to spend an hour shooting the shit on a message board.
Historically because it was impossible to have everyone vote on everything all the time.
Nowadays you still have the problem in some sense due to trust in voting systems, but theoretically you could run many of the functions of congress via calling a vote to the general population and they could do it on their smart phone or something. Auth would be hard(ish) from a practical perspective. Knowing enough about a topic could be easily resolved via allowing voters to appoint a proxy on certain bills or writ large.
Google Chrome is not the default browser on windows, isn’t even installed yet commands > 60% market share worldwide across all platforms, likely higher on windows.
Google Maps on iPhone has reportedly 70% market share, doesn’t come even installed.
This is not to say buying defaults is a good thing, but the premise that being default automatically commands usage and people don’t switch from default would be incorrect in these glaring examples.
Chrome because every time you visit google.com in a non-Chrome browser, it'll blast you with an ad to download Chrome.
Maps because by the time Chrome has pressured you into logging into your Google Account(TM), you've already drank the Kool-Aid (and/or they're pushing it via Google search rich results).
Fair points, I don't really have any data to counter that, but doubt you do either. At the end it can all be shown to be interconnected, whether good products are driving more adoption or just being default is ensuring the cycle continues, I'm not sure google understands it or is too scared to find out and so pays out.
One other thing I'll add is that Chrome doesn't advertise itself on safari (when browsing google.com) on an IOS device, at least all my current attempts to have it do that have failed.
That's because it's the default on Android, an operating system famously purchased and stewarded by Google that makes up globally the broad share of mobile. Please show me the breakdown on Windows, I bet the default is edge and bing and unless you're moderately tech savvy don't bother to change it. If you prove me wrong there I'll take your point, otherwise your point is disingenuous.
https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...
Here are stats for Desktops, this should exclude Android, and Chrome is 64% share, safari 12.49% share (which is Apple devices exclusive) and Edge 10.6%. If you do some deduction and eliminate Apple here, then it would increase chrome's share to 73% and Edge share to 12.5%,
On mobile edge doesn't show up in top 5, and is .6% on tablets.
Thank you! Okay so yeah looks like people still do choose Chrome independent of the default that is shipped. That would indicate people are making the switch because they like it, fair enough!
These kinds of arrangements are all over the commercial industry. For example, grocery stores charge slot fees to determine which products go on which shelves. Pepsi and Coke have exclusive distribution deals at thousands of retail points-of-sale. Companies have been paying to be included in Bundleware as long as the internet has been around. Medications, towards either generics or brand-names, are defaulted to in all sorts of scenarios. Dealerships only use OEM parts.
Should all of those arrangements be illegal also?
> However, we know from years of study on consumer behavior they don't.
It may be leveraging or protecting a monopoly when you already have one, but otherwise its just a mechanism of competition. (Like most mechanisms of conpetition, it favors those who already have an advantage—especially the particular advantage of a bigger pool of money to spend on it—which is essentially why we have rules conditioned on existing market power in the first place.)
Only if you're a wannabe (or actual) monopolist is it competiton, otherwise the product should compete on it's merits. Practically this doesn't happen, but I can argue ideals for no consequences on a message board. Similarly, I view advertising as largely manipulative and avoid it where possible, while paying for products that I derive value from.
For the record, if I were running a successful business I'd be paying for whatever I thought expanded the success of my company. I'm pragmatic above most other things, and play the game as it stands. That doesn't mean I can't hold on to extreme ideals at the same time. There is acknowledging reality isn't as you want it to be and working with that and then there's ignoring the reality in front of you. That latter one leads to ruin.
> That smaller but better product will have a much harder time growing if by default it is never exposed to the user.
my opinion is that if the product is vastly superior it would gain market share no matter what (we have countless examples for this). but if the new product is just a minor improvement or a minor change over the default choice, then yes, defaults would matter in that case.
because the differences between competitors are minute. as such the only real differentiator is how much they can afford to pay for being the default. if there was a huge breakthrough product it wouldn’t need to pay anything, people would just flock to it, defaults be damned.
I'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.
Well it's more like Google is victim of rent seeking. Pay me $26b or Bing will be the default. Google has clear first choice preference across a large swathe of the market.
Microsoft bundled their browser with the OS yet chrome/chromium is the largest browser by market share. People spent 5 minutes downloading and installing another browser. Switching search engines takes 20 seconds. How does defaulting a search engine harm users? Do you users pay more money? Are Google search inferior to other search engines?
Also what happens to Firefox if they can only charge a nominal fee for search engines priority? That is 90% of their revenue.
The way to beat google's search dominance is to build a better search engine. Bing could beat them today if "Browse by bing" didn't take 30+ seconds to get you results. It is vastly superior at finding answers than google search.
> People spent 5 minutes downloading and installing another browser. Switching search engines takes 20 seconds. Are Google search inferior to other search engines?
If that is true then why is Google spending $25 billion with a B per year? Do they like wasting money? Why isn't there a shareholder lawsuit?
The real answer is that they want to kill a chance to build competitors or for them to grow. No?
The real answer is that the browser vendors are abusing their market dominance, to charge incredible amounts of money to search engines in a pay to play scheme.
Can't add an edit to my own post past the time limit: I was pretty hesitant to add the bit about legislating. I'm not entirely convinced of it myself, but it seems to have been divisive enough to get responses while being interesting enough so that those responses aren't just flat out low quality. For a message board I think that's a win.
I stand by the fact I think this is anti competitive, its the big guy throwing weight around to prevent any little guys from emerging. I think that actively harms innovation, and by extension the consumer.
I know that's how things are and will likely continue to be. On the flip side I don't think it's entirely fair to say "Wow you did so well, but now we have to tie your hands as you're ripped to shreds by the hounds." Success should earn you some type of advantage, but I don't think first past the post should get you permanent immunity. Or if the market is so hard to compete in that it is infeasible for someone else, such that its a natural monopoly we have words for enterprises like that: Utility.
What you’re saying is true but people will switch defaults easily if the default is much better. It’s just RARELY new products are much better.
For some reason, the other search engines are not really better. Microsoft probably spent millions on Bing and it’s not fantastic. (I haven’t tried Kagi yet).
Not 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
Tires are safety-critical equipment with a minimum bar of performance and externally imposed regulations on them that they function at an acceptable level. This makes them a mostly fungible commodity. Search engines are not, and as Google shows, have no minimum bar of performance that a reasonable person can expect.
Also you buy tires once, and then beyond wear and tear they don’t just randomly degrade one day. With search engines you are continuously subject to the daily whims of Google beancounters.
There's a million other parts of your car that don't have any particular minimum bar of performance, or externally imposed regulation. By what right does Ford get to choose a default glove compartment, or sun flaps, or volume infotainment knob, etc, etc, etc.
What? That’s an even worse analogy. Being integral parts of the Ford truck, it’s like saying that users should have a choice of what programming language Google used for its services, or what brand server it uses in its data centers, or which brand of networking equipment it uses — utterly meaningless.
Tires don't control access to knowledge on an ongoing basis. I also own the tires in perpetuity. Arguably in the grand scheme of things tires are just not that important compared to something like a search engine. Tires are a commodity. Search isn't and so they need to be treated differently.
I don't think I'd entertain putting them at the same level and so the analogy falls apart.
They're not paying Ford for putting a Michelin tire on the vehicle, but they are likely getting an above "volume order" discount.
Similar to Search engines, how often do you hear about people changing the brand of tire on their vehicle? How often is it just "I bought another of what I already had"?
Except with Microsoft browsers, the populace has decades of conditioning telling us "Internet Explorer bad, need to install my own browser." And when Edge came out, everyone just continued what they were already doing. When Edge came out, it also had serious issues with media playback at times that reinforced that decision to many.
The power of the defaults is not overrated. This is just an excellent example of an "exception."
In the case of Google, they already have decades of conditioning with people viewing it as the main or only search engine worth anything. When you need to look up something, most people would tell you to "google it." The power of the defaults benefits google.com much better than it benefits Microsoft with browsers.
>The power of the defaults benefits google.com much better than it benefits Microsoft with browsers.
And that's simply because the delta between Google and the competition in search is greater than the delta between Microsoft and its competition in browsers
Right, so if your product is the default offering, and you're already the most popular, the competition has its legs cut out from under them.
Granted, the power of the defaults is usually strongest in the context of random settings in a product that end users don't know anything about. Search engines are something most people know at least something about by now.
I’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.
> 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%.
People on HN really over estimate the average user. I start any troubleshooting with older family be starting with "Show me how you normally get on the Internet" because who knows which browser theyve already been tricked into using.
I'm not quite sure how - but I'm pretty certain my grandmother uses the web exclusively through her phones stock email client. I've tried to show her... but I always find her inside some webview spawned by the email app eventually.
Chrome 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.
Google had 274 million unique visitors in the US as of February 2023 [1].
So it would cost closer to "only" $13.7bn/year for every American using Google to switch to Kagi.
And Google generated $76 billion in US ad revenue from those users in 2023 [2], just goes to show how "cheap" Kagi really is compared to being monetized by ads.
Just 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.
>since I'm paying them rather than the advertisers.
You don't pay advertisers with Google. Advertisers pay Google. Google is incentivized to give you useful results so that you continue coming back and using them for search. If they gave poor results people would stop bothering to use their search and they would get less ad impressions. By paying a flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time.
But if they delivered poor results for advertisers then they won’t pay Google. So ultimately you as the non-payer are second in line in terms of interests.
Google will try and give the most relevant ads and the most relevant search results. Advertisers love relevant ads and relevant ads give users a better ad experience.
Google is incentivized to improve the system for both advertisers and users.
Yes but when you have 5 relevant ads, the highest bidder goes to the top. The highest bidder can stay there by charging the customer more of what it has to pay Google to stay at the top. As long as the customer is not vigilant, Google pockets this money. So if you ignorantly believe Google gives better ads then they'd abuse this to just charge advertisers, and thus you, more.
> flat rate to kagi there is less incontive to maximize the amount of searches people do over time
Aren’t we seeing evidence of this incentive structure spinning in the opposite direction at Google? Shitty results mean more searches leading to more ad impressions.
It is better than Google for non-English content. You can try it for yourself.
When people say that Bing or DDG is good enough to use instead of Google, it is obvious to me that they are only searching in English. Kagi was the first search engine that could compete.
Visibly worse than searching for English content, but not bad overall. You still get random English results in between, like in DDG, which doesn't happen in Google.
I really like Kagi for a lot of search results and used it for a month, but when looking for local results, I always had to revert to Google.
For example, looking for local stores and businesses: usually, they just don't come up at all. I had forgotten how I used to have to tack the city I am in on to each query back in the day with Google.
Even then though, the lack of reviews, mapping, etc. makes it almost useless for what I really need.
I'd love to see Kagi improve in this area, and I'd happily pay again.
Thanks for the information. Last week when HN was praising Kagi, almost to the point of saying it had no faults whatsoever, I wondered if they were just blinding themselves to obvious flaws in the application. Disappointing, from this community that is usually so critical.
In fairness to both Kagi and other commnters, it works great for the searches I make all day while working on my desktop. I would go so far as to say it is significantly better than other attempts at replacing Google (e.g. Neeva.) It just doesn't work so well for the searches I make after work when making plans or on my phone while out and about.
This is me. Google Maps for local stuff, Kagi for everything else. It's not ideal but it's the best we have right now. Don't even bother mentioning Yelp.
I've used it some, but in the free version the results are outdated for a lot of things. I just don't think to use it instead of search, guess I'm old fashioned that way.
Agreed. I've also been using Kagi for the last month and love it, but local results are just not as good. They provide some Yelp locations but usually not as well as Google does. I wouldn't be surprised if this is improved over time. It seems like Kagi is a small team with the founder replying to me emails/bug ticket directly! Very effective people over there.
On a side note, Yelp is an awful platform. They show recommended/similar locations down your throat so hard on mobile that it's hard to learn about the actual location you're looking at.
Google local results are mostly dependent on Google maps, where the business owners themselves provide all the information. Kagi can never get those millions of businesses to provide them with that data. Even Apple have a hard time with that. So the option for Kagi is to try to hook in to Google maps. Because business owners anno 2023 refuse to make decent websites for their businesses.
> 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.
I 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.
That 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.
The 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.
IANAL... 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?
Because 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).
I 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.
> 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.
To 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.
This 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.
If 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.
Yeah 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.
I 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.
They 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.
How 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.
People are getting synthesized answers from LLMs that replace googling, filtering, and skimming for the info you need. Unless I misunderstand your question.
Unrelated, 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.
I assume you mean excluding individual websites; though the idea of a search engine ignoring all websites is pretty amusing... (maybe you still get hits from Usenet posts?)
Yeah, that’s the legwork you have to do. Honestly it’s probably not much legwork but if filters like this were more prevalent in say Google for example, it would turn into a cat and mouse game very quickly between search engine users and blogspam.
Yeah, I feel like the reason Kagi works is because google still delivers the majority of results to these sites. If Kagi one day becomes dominant, the filters will cease to work as you said.
I'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.
I’ve been a happy subscriber to Kagi ever since Neeva shut down. Kagi is much faster and yields better results for the kinds of queries I make. The domain filtering really makes a big difference.
I'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
Ive 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
> It’s a little behind google sometimes like with very breaking news
I view this as a feature, as I find my mental health improves the less I am tuned in to current events that are not explicitly relevant to my job or hobbies.
Even if you could block sites the issue fundamentally is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Ironically YouTube is what some use since any video that features a person reviewing the product is at least guaranteed to not be from a bot.
There generally just isn't a lot of organic content to be found for those types of queries. Best hope is reddit or similar enthusiast watering holes, but not every product category has a strong enthusiast community.
Google's plan to stop Apple from getting serious about search - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38023874 - Oct 2023 (269 comments)