I know I’m nitpicking, but this just doesn’t add up:
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
What? Worldwide, iOS market share is peanuts compared to Android. Depending on the report, the exact amount varies pretty widely, but nothing ever seems to report more than 18-ish percent worldwide. macOS is negligible. Meanwhile, Android’s market share is enormous.
Android devices alone—worldwide—could easily account for half of Google’s search traffic, especially when you consider countries like India. But the DOJ wants to argue that:
1. Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2. Half of Google’s traffic comes from Apple devices
If we believe that 92% figure, that places a generous upper limit of Google’s search traffic originating from Apple devices at about 20%, far short of “nearly half.”
Look, I hate the monopolistic nature of search just as much as the next person, but can we please double-check that our numbers actually make sense?
I’m really confused by what I’m reading on this page. Can someone clarify the different between these two?
Quoting:
> Apple iOS continues to hold its large share of the smartphone operating systems’ market within the United States, claiming more than half of the market in May 2020.
> ...
> Android still the one to catch
> Android, however, still holds the largest share of the United States smartphone operating systems’ market and has done for many year.
So this is about the smartphone operating systems, in the united states. Apple has “more than half of the market”, and Android has “the largest share”. How are both statements possibly true?
“In the United States, Apple iOS devices — those running on Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system account for roughly 60 percent of mobile-device usage. Apple’s
is a closed ecosystem; Apple does not license iOS to third-party mobile device manufacturers.
Another roughly 40 percent of mobile-device usage comes from devices that use Android, an open-source mobile operating system controlled by Google. Unlike iOS, Android is licensable, which means third-party mobile device manufacturers can use it as the operating system for their devices. All other mobile operating systems, combined account for less than one percent of mobile device usage in the United States.”
(Of course, whether that’s correct is a different question from whether that’s what the DoJ claims, but it doesn’t seem farfetched to me that it is correct, too)
No. That's NOT what the DOJ wants to argue. Yes, the complaint itself does refer to market share, but it doesn't specifically refer to "92 percent of the world's internet searches". In fact, the complaint refers to market share within the United States, since that's geographically relevant to the case. What happens elsewhere isn't. [1]
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
92 percent links to a report by statcounter.com [2]. That's the NYTimes making a claim about Google's market share and linking to a source.
If you read the sentence even more carefully, you'll see the word "which" appear twice. "Which" grammatically denotes a non-defining clause from the perspective of the writer. It's information that you could remove without altering the core of the sentence: [3]
"The Justice Department argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google the center of consumers’ online lives"
More importantly, "which" is gramatically used from the perspective of the writer to give a bit of non-essential background to the sentence. And so, what is absolutely NOT being said here, is that the DOJ claims that Google holds a 92 percent market share.
>Over the years, Google has steadily increased its dominant position in general
search services. In July 2007, Google estimated its general search services market share at
68 percent. By June 2013, Google estimated that its share in the United States had already
increased to 77 percent on computers. By April 2018, Google estimated that its share was
79 percent on computers and 93.5 percent on mobile. More recently, Google has accounted for
almost 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent
of queries on mobile devices. Recent share estimates are in Figures 7 and 8.
The NYT constantly embellishes like this, it's a really shitty part of its style. If you want to add information, don't infix it within a description of the Justice Department's argument. At least put the editorial in a different paragraph, if not the editorial section.
Pretty sure the "over half" figure refers to traffic in the US, where iOS is around half of mobile devices, unlike the global market where Android has a definite monopoly outside the US.
The DOJ legislates largely based on US figures, but noting Google's global power is hard to ignore completely.
They said “worldwide” for the other figure and failed to specify the region [in the article] for the other. I think you’re right, but it’s still deceptive, and I’m inclined to believe it was deliberate. Even though the DOJ does seem to clarify in the actual filing, it rubs me the wrong way, and the article summarizing the events is misleading.
If this is what they meant, then the usefulness of the statement is even more questionable. If more than half of mobile devices are iOS, then your prior expectation would be that more than half of traffic would come from those devices.
The justice department doesn't care who handles search traffic in Cambodia, Canada, or Taiwan. They are only interested in US based search traffic where iOS has 50%+ market share.
> preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple,
Be careful what you ask for. If you make such deals illegal, Apple will have to set Google as search engine for FREE thus benefiting Google.
As a non-murican it baffles me that US government will try to hurt its own successful companies in this fashion which smells of incompetence and political vendetta rather than genuine concern for the health of search ecosystem.
Presumably it would only be Google prevented from entering into such agreements, since nobody else has a dominant market position in search.
The interesting question then would be whether Apple would take somebody else's money and change the default search engine on their devices. Which might net them almost as much money, but might also irritate a lot of their users if the highest bidder isn't as good of a search engine.
Companies like Google are starting to have way too much influence on government. Government does not like it at all so they'll take measures to curb the influence one or the other way.
They do, and also it makes a better case than worldwide where Google is kneecapped by the Chinese government to benefit Bandung, or Russia where Yandex is a strong competitor.
And are a way, way more attractive demographic for advertisers. I knew about the deal, but until the House report I didn’t realize it made up such a high proportion of Apple’s profits (14 to 21%). Knowing Apple, they must be driving a hard bargain.
Yeah. Go to Walmart and look at the cellphones in green boxes that get sold for non-contract usage. They are all Android and most will be used for messages and calls. They are absolutely horrific to use for web browsing. Maybe in a couple of generations that will change.
Yes, why try to justify such an obviously incorrect statement? It's clear that the only reasonable explanation is that it is US traffic only where iOS indeed has over 50% market share.
iOS really dominates — I’d guess that half of the Android users get pushed by a salesman at a carrier store, who get spiffed by different companies. Many only buy a smartphone because they are unaware flip phones still exist!
The irony of the suit will be when Google is barred from paying for preferential treatment, then everyone chooses them as the default anyway, saving Google billions of dollars per year while leaving their 95% market share untouched.
Who had Apple down on their betting sheet as the biggest loser from a Google anti-trust lawsuit?
Apple won't be the biggest loser; Mozilla will be.
If Google is compelled to stop making search deals, Mozilla loses 90% of their income. They just laid off tons of staff. How many more will they be forced to cut?
Apple I suspect will be just fine. But this isn't good news at all on the browser monoculture front.
It would be an absurd conclusion to reach that Google can't pay Mozilla to feature their search, but can sink billions into Chrome to gain market share.... and feature their search. I don't see a sensible end state though. What do you do? Spin off Chrome, destroy it as a business by preventing it from doing a deal with Google to feature Google search... and then what? Act surprised when web browser development stops dead?
Wouldn't they just try to get Microsoft to pay instead? I doubt Mozilla cares which search engine they're getting paid to make default as long as they're getting money somehow. And MS hasn't given up on trying to push Bing on people, so I could see them going for a deal like that.
Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? 12 billion might just be the cost of keeping them out of the search market.
It's not 2000 anymore. Building a web scale search engine no longer requires novel distributed systems work, and the most viable search algorithms have strong open source implementations. It's still a very hard problem to get right, but you can create an "interesting" poc in a few weeks. Recent work on unspervised content based recommenders can help reduce click stream data requirements.
Are Bing and DDG using those algorithms? Because every 6-8 months I give one of them a try and they are horrible. First I force myself a week of no falling back to Google when I cannot find anything and then slowly I just give up again. Did they misunderstand something elementary?
It is important to not confuse Google Reader/Notes/Chat with Google Search. Google Search is the gateway to Google's vast profits and they put many of their best people on keeping the product top notch. There are probably hundreds of sub-models and thousands of optimizations that would take years to build out.
This is true, but not in a way you think. Conventional wisdom tells us that you're gonna need completely different approaches across the stack (not just technological but organizational as well) when a problem size grows 10x, and the web has grown about 100x from 2000.
Sort of. Google is paying Apple to not doing something else. When 8-12B is gone, Apple loses the incentive to not make something like DDG the default or build or buy their own search engine.
Have you seen normal people using their iPhones and iPads? If so, did they ever change any default?
I have family members who I'd call "computer literate 101" (i.e. they can use e-mail, create a PowerPoint, buy something on the web). Their homescreen is a history of their apps downloads, everything just gets added to the next available space. They do not use folders, they do not move icons. They do not enable large text size even though it would help them see the text better. They do not change the default ringtone. They do not use "do not disturb" when they're in a restaurant.
The reason is, they don't even know these options exist. They have never opened the Settings app.
To change the default search engine, you need to go three screens deep in Settings.app.
If Google stops paying Apple and Apple changes the default (for new users) to Bing or whatever, 99.5% of new users will just use Bing.
There is probably going to be another search player willing to pay to be the default on Apple, with the increase of usage, due to being the default, they will make more money, with more money they will be able to improve their service faster.
Unless search quality is critical for Apple, which would be surprising seeing the search quality of Siri
I'm surprised by how many people are ok with this sort of pay to play. The search engine (or any other tech) that wins in the market should be the one best at being a search engine. Not the one willing to pay Apple the most money.
not just money but data. the more data they get the better their search results get. and the better their results get the more money they get in a loop. meaning a startup can’t compete due to the sheer amount of data google has
Before Google was so aggressive about paying everyone to set themselves as the default search engine, Bing used to pay to be the only search option on a number of mobile devices and disable the ability to change that default (presumably because everyone would just switch back to Google). So for a while, a lot of Android devices sold by mobile networks in places like Europe forced searches to Bing with no way to change that.
If the Justice Department contines with this attempt to stop Google paying to be the default, I can easily see this ending in a situation where their non-search competitors are worse off financially and consumers have substantially less choice than they do now.
No money coming to Apple could have other effects, like more aggressive anonymization of search data, or even caching on Apple’s side, or any other technical setup that their contract prevents them from doing now.
Also Google is not the best engine everywhere nor for everyone.
I think a sign of this is if it was that simple Google wouldn’t be paying that much in the first place.
It would be a big hit.. but here’s where I think openAI has a big play and it’s a shame MSFT has exclusive access. You train gpt-3 to rank web pages and of course general knowledge.
I don't think it's that clear that that would be the outcome. If Apple was allowed to get payed by Bing, because they are not the market leader, I think some people would switch back to Google but many people would just keep Bing.
Also Apple could build its own search engine (using either google or bing as an api) or they could say buy DDG.
I can pretty much guarantee many tech-illiterate users will not really realize anything changed. Or they won‘t care.
Funny fact: check out the mobile version of bing.com. The MS logo is hidden from the viewport unless you scroll up. Almost as if MS is pretty ok with not advertising to people too much that they’re on their platform.
They might mandate that the user be asked to pick a search engine from a randomly-ordered list during initial setup. We've already been through this with Microsoft and web browsers.
It is an interesting exercise to look at the barriers to entry for search engines.
Clearly there are technology challenges (internet scale web crawler, indexer, search interface, ad technology) but these are not novel challenges anymore.
Funding is an issue as operating a general search index is likely very expensive with high upfront investment. Marginal costs are nearly zero as the major expense is likely fixed (crawling and indexing the internet) while variable costs are a small percentage (serving search results for each request).
Google, like Nike, Gucci, and Procter & Gamble, has spent billions to build their brand perception and cement the habit of using their products despite there often being minimal actual differences between competitive products.
But the critical one really does seem to be attracting new users. The history of DDG, ClickZ, Bing all seem to validate this. Just getting a user to _try_ a new search engine is very difficult despite it being "one click away." Certainly a deal with a browser maker / mobile manufacturer would aid this but it's priced amazingly out of the reach of competitors denying perhaps the most obvious way to get trials and traffic.
Google clearly knows this. How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
You're missing the most novel technology: ranking.
Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results).
You're right that drawing users is a big challenge, but privacy gives you a way in there (again DDG). It just isn't enough if you can't provide better results.
Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.
Which is extremely expensive in engineering time because ranking isn't static but rather a constant war with gaming.
Thanks for pointing out ranking search results as a technology investment required; I tend to think of it as part of indexing but a good call out.
I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google.
> Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.
I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).
You clearly underestimate the complexity of turning 4 keywords into 3 links that answer these keywords. This is so hard that even Google is not very good at it. But Google is way better than the competition.
Only the crawler infrastructure you need to populate your index requires several thousands of dollars of server per month, that's a lot for a company without founding. Then you need to remove spam, you need to understands each document that you crawl, you need to rank them, ...
A simple exercise that you can do is to just do a search for your personal knowledge base, you will see that it is much harder that you thought
I could be wrong but I always thought the fact Google has such high penetration of Google Analytics makes their ranking a lot easier. They can see how much time users spend on site and other behaviour. This must make it a lot easier to know which results are "good".
Yeah. I have made DDG my default but for specific queries (e.g. not “IMDb Manchurian candidate” but “terraform aws_subnet data”) I end up going back to google like half the time.
I imagine user clicks are an important signal which helps a search engine refine its results. If no one ever clicks on a particular link for they were shown when searching for "foo", then there's something about that link that makes it a less attractive result.
>> How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
When stuff gets paradoxicalish, it can be because the paradigm/model is wrong.
In this case, the model is the economic-legal model formulating monopoly theories and antitrust legislation. They were thinking mostly in terms of factories. Thinking of "barriers to entry" in terms of fixed/marginal costs makes a different kind of sense for factories.
You can't pay an $nbn "fixed cost" price to "build a fb." That's like the old outsourcing joke/prank: Job: Build me an app that makes $1m. Will pay $10k. It also isn't factory unit economics that determines success for a Google, FB or many other modern mega-businesses. Owning 1% of fb's social media traffic does not yield 1% of fb or adwords' revenue. It's more of a "rewards to scale" than an "economies of scale" thing. Revenue goes up. Unit cost may go down, but that's besides the point for fb or adwords ad revenues. The scale itself matters, not the savings it generates.
TLDR: trying to examine google's anatomy using a model based on Bell or Ford circa 1929 will result in confusing questions.
Meanwhile, monopolies have a logic of their own. They're valuable, and therefore worth paying to have. That's how deals like this should be viewed, imo. It's strong circumstantial evidence of monopoly. The deal, in itself, shouldn't be the object of objection.
I think, as with all anti-trust/anti-competitive questions, if you define the scope wrong then of course the entity claiming unfair practices can be positioned to win. "A deal that controls the internet" is really a pretty sweeping claim!
Is the question whether this deal prevents companies from developing and selling their search solution? If so, then is Google paying Apple, who has what, 40% market share of mobile phones, really able to stifle the development of search engines? With search on mobile phones being a further x% fraction of all (general, browser-opening) search being done on the internet? I.e. when placed with desktop, tablet, browser window search as well.
If we're down to perhaps low double digit % of all search, how it that unfairly preventing competition?
And yes, if you then go to the opposite extreme and say that the market is search on Safari on iPhones, then the market is cornered and controlled by Google. But is that reasonable to define as the market in question? Where you're entitled to not have anti-competitive behavior? That's Peter Thiel's example of having cornered the market for British food in downtown Palo Alto and prevented competitors from moving into your rented space.
It may be a sweetheart deal for Apple, and Google making sure that it gets preferred treatment in this one corner of the internet, but it seems to me hard to claim that this has stifled competition for the development of search engines in general?
> If so, then is Google paying Apple, who has what, 40% market share of mobile phones, really able to stifle the development of search engines?
Isn't the other 60% basically just (Google's) Android?
And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
Then why didn't they go after that instead? That's even more blatant if so.
> And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
Wait, now we need to make sure others can develop a good search engine? That's what fairness in competition is?
That's a whole new level of argument. I cannot imagine a court wanting to step into that territory.
Indeed, and by defining the market as search, which people don’t pay for, rather than internet advertising, which people do, you can obscure what’s going on still further.
> this is a time to use revenue instead of profits
Totally the opposite. Capital projects are greenlit on profits. The profits Google delivers to Apple are a better argument against it building its own search engine than the revenues.
we do know the number was 1B in 2014 when oracle blurted it out in court.
We know Mozilla's numbers for a similar type of deal from that era and now. We also how market share and absolute devices have trended from 2014 to now.
Apple' s dominance in mobile and mobile as platform having a larger impact on search then web.
Putting it altogether 8-12B is a fair estimate.
To see it another way, if google is ready to pay mozilla $500 M / year with a browser in single digit market share and predominant presence only in web, 20x to apple is pretty easy
Only on here could people say that the engineering challenges Google faces in delivering search are 'solved problems' that could be easily mimicked.
I get that people don't like the surveillance tech business model, I don't really like it myself. But we can't just pretend that the personal data that they gather to serve you ads more effectively isn't also the reason their search results, at least in my experience, are better than their competitors'.
It is a solved problem for big tech , apple already has one with siri suggested site.
Just like maps. Apple one day decided google maps is no longer thr default and implemented their own. Sure they had bad early years and hilarious issues, however they are on par or comparable to google maps today.
And I suspect this is why Apple doesn't implement its own search index / service.
If I were at Apple and I had payments like this coming in, I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine. This because Google can 'turn off' this at any moment, so having that be a non-threat would be useful. Further there is a tremendous amount of value in crawling the web in terms of data set generation. And finally it really would allow them to build knowledge bases that would enable Siri to be more effective as a verbal assistant.
But while the cash is pouring in like that? Well just ride that fountain of cash for as long as you can.
Apple does implement its own search index and service.
It just doesn’t using it to compete with Google head on currently.
I’m guessing that their strategy would be to continue to integrate search results across the os gradually, rather than building a straight up Google competitor.
Yep - I imagine the "siri suggested site" thing is a preview (and threat) that Apple has a search engine in its back pocket that it's ready to roll out whenever.
The way I think about it, Google's interests aren't aligned with Apple's interests.
Think about the money that Apple has invested in their own bespoke ARM chips. They could have stuck with Broadcom or Samsung chips for the iPhone but they didn't. They wanted things that they couldn't get access to through a supplier, and a competitive advantage.
If I were an executive at Apple I would look at the risk every supplier contributed to overall profitability and margins. And I would look to see how much value I could capture for Apple vs paying it out to third parties.
So for me the question is about "How much of the user experience can I ensure will meet my standards?" and having your own search engine would help there. There are other values as well when you can make large scale semantic queries against the entire web. And it can be extremely lucrative to tie the "search experience" as a feeder into your other products (which is part of what the Justice department doesn't like about Google)
> I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine.
I'd be surprised if one of the conditions for the lucrativeness of this payment is paying Apple to not compete in Google's bread & butter, which is why I don't see there's any risk that Google would stop paying for placement whilst iOS maintains its valuable user base.
If they do decide to pull the plug Apple can always acquire DDG and give themselves a head start to building a competitor.
Acquiring DDG wouldn't give them much of a head start as its value is mostly anonymizing Bing searches. Apple could just work out a deal directly with Microsoft instead.
Apple does certain things well but the kind of area that a quality search engine falls in kind of feels out of their capabilities. They've struggled to get Maps to be useable and Siri is pretty bad despite being the first virtual assistant.
Currently yes. However if they spent the whole $14 billion a year it wouldn't take long for apple to pull it off. I dont know what google spends on their search algorithm, but it cant be orders of magnitude more than $14 billion annually.
Readit News
> Nearly half of Google’s search traffic now comes from Apple devices, according to the Justice Department
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
What? Worldwide, iOS market share is peanuts compared to Android. Depending on the report, the exact amount varies pretty widely, but nothing ever seems to report more than 18-ish percent worldwide. macOS is negligible. Meanwhile, Android’s market share is enormous.
Android devices alone—worldwide—could easily account for half of Google’s search traffic, especially when you consider countries like India. But the DOJ wants to argue that:
1. Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2. Half of Google’s traffic comes from Apple devices
If we believe that 92% figure, that places a generous upper limit of Google’s search traffic originating from Apple devices at about 20%, far short of “nearly half.”
Look, I hate the monopolistic nature of search just as much as the next person, but can we please double-check that our numbers actually make sense?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...
Quoting:
> Apple iOS continues to hold its large share of the smartphone operating systems’ market within the United States, claiming more than half of the market in May 2020.
> ...
> Android still the one to catch
> Android, however, still holds the largest share of the United States smartphone operating systems’ market and has done for many year.
So this is about the smartphone operating systems, in the united states. Apple has “more than half of the market”, and Android has “the largest share”. How are both statements possibly true?
“In the United States, Apple iOS devices — those running on Apple’s proprietary mobile operating system account for roughly 60 percent of mobile-device usage. Apple’s is a closed ecosystem; Apple does not license iOS to third-party mobile device manufacturers.
Another roughly 40 percent of mobile-device usage comes from devices that use Android, an open-source mobile operating system controlled by Google. Unlike iOS, Android is licensable, which means third-party mobile device manufacturers can use it as the operating system for their devices. All other mobile operating systems, combined account for less than one percent of mobile device usage in the United States.”
(Of course, whether that’s correct is a different question from whether that’s what the DoJ claims, but it doesn’t seem farfetched to me that it is correct, too)
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile-tablet/uni...
Mobile and Mobile/Tablet are pretty much the same, and Tablet only giving Apple a few percentage points advantage further (~65%).
No. That's NOT what the DOJ wants to argue. Yes, the complaint itself does refer to market share, but it doesn't specifically refer to "92 percent of the world's internet searches". In fact, the complaint refers to market share within the United States, since that's geographically relevant to the case. What happens elsewhere isn't. [1]
[1] https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/documents/GOOGLEANTITRUST...
This is what the NYTimes wrote:
> The Justice Department, which is asking for a court injunction preventing Google from entering into deals like the one it made with Apple, argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google, which handles 92 percent of the world’s internet searches, the center of consumers’ online lives.
92 percent links to a report by statcounter.com [2]. That's the NYTimes making a claim about Google's market share and linking to a source.
If you read the sentence even more carefully, you'll see the word "which" appear twice. "Which" grammatically denotes a non-defining clause from the perspective of the writer. It's information that you could remove without altering the core of the sentence: [3]
"The Justice Department argues that the arrangement has unfairly helped make Google the center of consumers’ online lives"
More importantly, "which" is gramatically used from the perspective of the writer to give a bit of non-essential background to the sentence. And so, what is absolutely NOT being said here, is that the DOJ claims that Google holds a 92 percent market share.
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/25/technology/apple-google-s... [3] https://www.grammarly.com/blog/which-vs-that/
>Over the years, Google has steadily increased its dominant position in general search services. In July 2007, Google estimated its general search services market share at 68 percent. By June 2013, Google estimated that its share in the United States had already increased to 77 percent on computers. By April 2018, Google estimated that its share was 79 percent on computers and 93.5 percent on mobile. More recently, Google has accounted for almost 90 percent of all general search engine queries in the United States, and almost 95 percent of queries on mobile devices. Recent share estimates are in Figures 7 and 8.
The DOJ legislates largely based on US figures, but noting Google's global power is hard to ignore completely.
The justice department doesn't care who handles search traffic in Cambodia, Canada, or Taiwan. They are only interested in US based search traffic where iOS has 50%+ market share.
Be careful what you ask for. If you make such deals illegal, Apple will have to set Google as search engine for FREE thus benefiting Google.
As a non-murican it baffles me that US government will try to hurt its own successful companies in this fashion which smells of incompetence and political vendetta rather than genuine concern for the health of search ecosystem.
The interesting question then would be whether Apple would take somebody else's money and change the default search engine on their devices. Which might net them almost as much money, but might also irritate a lot of their users if the highest bidder isn't as good of a search engine.
I'd assume it's referring to both only US traffic and only mobile traffic.
Because if you make it worldwide or include desktops/laptops, it's laughable.
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-st...
1.) Google handles 92% of global search traffic
2.) extrapolate to the US (since it's likely the same, if not higher) : Google handles 92% of US search traffic
3.) Half of Google's US traffic comes from Apple devices (since Apple controls 60% of the smartphone market in the US).
Deleted Comment
iOS really dominates — I’d guess that half of the Android users get pushed by a salesman at a carrier store, who get spiffed by different companies. Many only buy a smartphone because they are unaware flip phones still exist!
Who had Apple down on their betting sheet as the biggest loser from a Google anti-trust lawsuit?
If Google is compelled to stop making search deals, Mozilla loses 90% of their income. They just laid off tons of staff. How many more will they be forced to cut?
Apple I suspect will be just fine. But this isn't good news at all on the browser monoculture front.
It's not 2000 anymore. Building a web scale search engine no longer requires novel distributed systems work, and the most viable search algorithms have strong open source implementations. It's still a very hard problem to get right, but you can create an "interesting" poc in a few weeks. Recent work on unspervised content based recommenders can help reduce click stream data requirements.
App Store search says.
A decent search engine is not worth the massive amount of 12 billion dollars. The advertising platform Google build is!
Apple 1) can't recreate that 2) it shouldn't as advertising is not in their DNA and opposite of their privacy core values.
Apple can build a search engine (or just switch to Bing) but they wouldn't be able monetize that for $12000000000.
They certainly have been hiring people who know how to build search tech.
>Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
This is true, but not in a way you think. Conventional wisdom tells us that you're gonna need completely different approaches across the stack (not just technological but organizational as well) when a problem size grows 10x, and the web has grown about 100x from 2000.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the DOJ case fell apart because Apple released it's own search engine?
I have family members who I'd call "computer literate 101" (i.e. they can use e-mail, create a PowerPoint, buy something on the web). Their homescreen is a history of their apps downloads, everything just gets added to the next available space. They do not use folders, they do not move icons. They do not enable large text size even though it would help them see the text better. They do not change the default ringtone. They do not use "do not disturb" when they're in a restaurant.
The reason is, they don't even know these options exist. They have never opened the Settings app.
To change the default search engine, you need to go three screens deep in Settings.app.
If Google stops paying Apple and Apple changes the default (for new users) to Bing or whatever, 99.5% of new users will just use Bing.
There is probably going to be another search player willing to pay to be the default on Apple, with the increase of usage, due to being the default, they will make more money, with more money they will be able to improve their service faster.
Unless search quality is critical for Apple, which would be surprising seeing the search quality of Siri
If the Justice Department contines with this attempt to stop Google paying to be the default, I can easily see this ending in a situation where their non-search competitors are worse off financially and consumers have substantially less choice than they do now.
But yeah, I'm sure we all know more about Google's strategic outlook than high-level Google execs.
Also Google is not the best engine everywhere nor for everyone.
I think a sign of this is if it was that simple Google wouldn’t be paying that much in the first place.
Anyone doing a gpt-3 search mashup?
Also Apple could build its own search engine (using either google or bing as an api) or they could say buy DDG.
Funny fact: check out the mobile version of bing.com. The MS logo is hidden from the viewport unless you scroll up. Almost as if MS is pretty ok with not advertising to people too much that they’re on their platform.
I used a distro that made yahoo default in Firefox. It’s fine. I’ll end up switching to google eventually but haven’t been arsed to do it yet.
Clearly there are technology challenges (internet scale web crawler, indexer, search interface, ad technology) but these are not novel challenges anymore.
Funding is an issue as operating a general search index is likely very expensive with high upfront investment. Marginal costs are nearly zero as the major expense is likely fixed (crawling and indexing the internet) while variable costs are a small percentage (serving search results for each request).
Google, like Nike, Gucci, and Procter & Gamble, has spent billions to build their brand perception and cement the habit of using their products despite there often being minimal actual differences between competitive products.
But the critical one really does seem to be attracting new users. The history of DDG, ClickZ, Bing all seem to validate this. Just getting a user to _try_ a new search engine is very difficult despite it being "one click away." Certainly a deal with a browser maker / mobile manufacturer would aid this but it's priced amazingly out of the reach of competitors denying perhaps the most obvious way to get trials and traffic.
Google clearly knows this. How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
Without that everything else is pretty much useless (which is why DDG primarily republishes Bing results).
You're right that drawing users is a big challenge, but privacy gives you a way in there (again DDG). It just isn't enough if you can't provide better results.
Google works hard to maintain their dominance on a lot of fronts, some questionable and in need of regulation, but the biggest reason for their position is, as it always was, ranking algos.
Which is extremely expensive in engineering time because ranking isn't static but rather a constant war with gaming.
I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google.
(not blind but compare https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper with https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; do you really want 3 pinterest results to this query; this is the burden of being the dominant search engine - you're the one people will game)
--edited for typos
I've seen this repeatedly brought into question in recent years and I've also observed it myself. Google's search quality is suffering horribly and it seems at least partly related to them moving away from the PageRank-like algorithms that made it famous (or, more reasonably, including many new additional components to it which are unrelated to PageRank and which are drowning out the signal).
You clearly underestimate the complexity of turning 4 keywords into 3 links that answer these keywords. This is so hard that even Google is not very good at it. But Google is way better than the competition.
Only the crawler infrastructure you need to populate your index requires several thousands of dollars of server per month, that's a lot for a company without founding. Then you need to remove spam, you need to understands each document that you crawl, you need to rank them, ...
A simple exercise that you can do is to just do a search for your personal knowledge base, you will see that it is much harder that you thought
Google spends billions to secure its position, which makes it virtually impossible for new companies to enter the market.
That said I often use incognito mode for Google searches and it's still quite good.
When stuff gets paradoxicalish, it can be because the paradigm/model is wrong.
In this case, the model is the economic-legal model formulating monopoly theories and antitrust legislation. They were thinking mostly in terms of factories. Thinking of "barriers to entry" in terms of fixed/marginal costs makes a different kind of sense for factories.
You can't pay an $nbn "fixed cost" price to "build a fb." That's like the old outsourcing joke/prank: Job: Build me an app that makes $1m. Will pay $10k. It also isn't factory unit economics that determines success for a Google, FB or many other modern mega-businesses. Owning 1% of fb's social media traffic does not yield 1% of fb or adwords' revenue. It's more of a "rewards to scale" than an "economies of scale" thing. Revenue goes up. Unit cost may go down, but that's besides the point for fb or adwords ad revenues. The scale itself matters, not the savings it generates.
TLDR: trying to examine google's anatomy using a model based on Bell or Ford circa 1929 will result in confusing questions.
Meanwhile, monopolies have a logic of their own. They're valuable, and therefore worth paying to have. That's how deals like this should be viewed, imo. It's strong circumstantial evidence of monopoly. The deal, in itself, shouldn't be the object of objection.
Is the question whether this deal prevents companies from developing and selling their search solution? If so, then is Google paying Apple, who has what, 40% market share of mobile phones, really able to stifle the development of search engines? With search on mobile phones being a further x% fraction of all (general, browser-opening) search being done on the internet? I.e. when placed with desktop, tablet, browser window search as well.
If we're down to perhaps low double digit % of all search, how it that unfairly preventing competition?
And yes, if you then go to the opposite extreme and say that the market is search on Safari on iPhones, then the market is cornered and controlled by Google. But is that reasonable to define as the market in question? Where you're entitled to not have anti-competitive behavior? That's Peter Thiel's example of having cornered the market for British food in downtown Palo Alto and prevented competitors from moving into your rented space.
It may be a sweetheart deal for Apple, and Google making sure that it gets preferred treatment in this one corner of the internet, but it seems to me hard to claim that this has stifled competition for the development of search engines in general?
Isn't the other 60% basically just (Google's) Android?
And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
> And I think these days, search engines aren't just developed by someone coding up a clever algorithm in their garage; they improve based on data from being used a lot. So yes, it would be an obstacle to competitors.
Wait, now we need to make sure others can develop a good search engine? That's what fairness in competition is?
That's a whole new level of argument. I cannot imagine a court wanting to step into that territory.
$260 Billion in revenue in 2019, so that's ~4% of Apple's revenue.
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Totally the opposite. Capital projects are greenlit on profits. The profits Google delivers to Apple are a better argument against it building its own search engine than the revenues.
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The house report says they don't know how much Google pays and they pulled the numbers from a story on the web that was guessing.
So as of right now no one knows what the revenue or profit is.
We know Mozilla's numbers for a similar type of deal from that era and now. We also how market share and absolute devices have trended from 2014 to now.
Apple' s dominance in mobile and mobile as platform having a larger impact on search then web.
Putting it altogether 8-12B is a fair estimate.
To see it another way, if google is ready to pay mozilla $500 M / year with a browser in single digit market share and predominant presence only in web, 20x to apple is pretty easy
I get that people don't like the surveillance tech business model, I don't really like it myself. But we can't just pretend that the personal data that they gather to serve you ads more effectively isn't also the reason their search results, at least in my experience, are better than their competitors'.
It is a solved problem for big tech , apple already has one with siri suggested site.
Just like maps. Apple one day decided google maps is no longer thr default and implemented their own. Sure they had bad early years and hilarious issues, however they are on par or comparable to google maps today.
The word "cartel" already exists.
If I were at Apple and I had payments like this coming in, I would absolutely take $1B/year off to fund building a search engine. This because Google can 'turn off' this at any moment, so having that be a non-threat would be useful. Further there is a tremendous amount of value in crawling the web in terms of data set generation. And finally it really would allow them to build knowledge bases that would enable Siri to be more effective as a verbal assistant.
But while the cash is pouring in like that? Well just ride that fountain of cash for as long as you can.
It just doesn’t using it to compete with Google head on currently.
I’m guessing that their strategy would be to continue to integrate search results across the os gradually, rather than building a straight up Google competitor.
Unless of course they are forced to.
You could always switch to Bing, which isn't really that bad as a Google replacement.
In all seriousness though why would Google want to ever turn itself off for Apple devices? That would backfire horribly.
Think about the money that Apple has invested in their own bespoke ARM chips. They could have stuck with Broadcom or Samsung chips for the iPhone but they didn't. They wanted things that they couldn't get access to through a supplier, and a competitive advantage.
If I were an executive at Apple I would look at the risk every supplier contributed to overall profitability and margins. And I would look to see how much value I could capture for Apple vs paying it out to third parties.
So for me the question is about "How much of the user experience can I ensure will meet my standards?" and having your own search engine would help there. There are other values as well when you can make large scale semantic queries against the entire web. And it can be extremely lucrative to tie the "search experience" as a feeder into your other products (which is part of what the Justice department doesn't like about Google)
I'd be surprised if one of the conditions for the lucrativeness of this payment is paying Apple to not compete in Google's bread & butter, which is why I don't see there's any risk that Google would stop paying for placement whilst iOS maintains its valuable user base.
If they do decide to pull the plug Apple can always acquire DDG and give themselves a head start to building a competitor.