So what's going to happen? Most users will probably still use Google, nobody is getting paid and Google is saving a bundle.

I get the thinking that you have to prevent lock-in (eg Ticketmaster and venues) but Google didn't buy its way into dominance annd maintain their dominance through exclusivity deals. They simply have a better product and I don't expect anyone to match them anytime soon (cue the DDG "I switched from Google to DDG 78 years ago" crowd).

I disagree. 100% they had a better product, but they have absolutely mangled it over the last few updates. Honestly, if I wanted the opinion of randomnumbers45123 on Reddit, I'd just search Reddit.

Google achieved dominance ~25 years ago by being better than the alternatives, and the other search engines pretty much withered away rapidly. They (Google) are in a very precarious position right now. They will certainly not disappear overnight, but if / when the public becomes aware of something better, the implosion could be spectacular.

What logic? The person you’re replying to didn’t explain their reasoning, so any logic you’re seeing is being constructed in your own head and projected onto someone else. In other words, you’re likely responding to an argument you’ve seen (and disagreed with) before instead of what that poster had in mind (which may or may not jive with what is in your head).

Google doesn’t just show ads, they track you and have the infrastructure to sell your information to people who buy ad space. That is fundamentally different from a website that makes money by showing ads, many of which they don’t pick themselves. So yes, Google is an ad company. And they’re one “first” because that’s where their efforts are, not because of the revenue. YouTube, Chrome, their web proposals, it all serves the same goal: ads, ads, ads, and keeping Google’s dominance in the space.

So you understand what I’m talking about. I didn’t mean selling the information directly. Because why would they, they make more money by keeping the data to themselves and selling you out indirectly from the information they gathered over and over.

Calling it "ads" and Google an "advertising company" is just making a vague allusion to what's really going on and does not carry the proper connotation of exploitation.

They have your email (gmail), location history (google maps), search history (google), viewing history (youtube) and know pretty much every site you've visited (chrome + ad network).

This is the data they aggregate and sell to advertisers so that their ads can target highly specific groups of people - they don't want the advertisers getting the direct dataset, that would be competition.

It’s something people have a really difficult time preaching logically, the veil of deception of many things. Another big example is TV, which are ad sales companies, not TV show distributors, even if they’ve successfully swindled people into a mindset where they actually pay the providers, for the privilege of being sold advertisement.

It’s really a rather interesting and eye opening segment of largely the US society that is both extremely dominant and has effectively been extremely damaging, and yet, people simply cannot see that they are like mindless drones, being programmed and reprogrammed with TV shows and advertisement.

Are they a livestreaming "first" business-man/company/sole trader?

Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.

Maybe, it depends on what they do next. Will they start uploading fewer videos and live-streaming more because they realised that’s where the money is?

> Revenue sources are not necessarily the be all and end all of determining what your key business concern is, or what your business should put first.

Agreed. But Google does put ads first. All the tracking, web proposals, Chrome, it’s all in service of ads. Perhaps you’re using an ad blocker and that’s making you forget, but Google’s services, like search and YouTube, are huge blobs of ads with a few bits of content sprinkled throughout and the ratio is getting worse in the ads’ favour. So yes, Google is an ad company. Not because it makes the most money from it, but because most of its effort is in expanding and defending their ad revenue. Heck, they literally spend billions of dollars just to make sure you search with their engine to see their ads.

Yes. And if you press them economically, it will show.

The only difference is that most people do not optimize their lives for profit.

True, but in addition to the revenue Google ALSO tailors all their products to facilitate their advertising products. It's sort of like a singer who sells merch. The merch makes money but it also props up the singers singing career and funds tours.

Chrome revolves around ads, android revolves around ads, maps revolves around ads, gmail revolves around ads. If you take a hard look at all their products their all linked to Google's advertisement offerings in one way or another. That, to me, means adtech is their main line of business.

There were two major reasons. It could be deployed on all platforms we used (we didn't support iOS). Secondly it was by far the most reliable. We still have the occasional use who would use Chrome on Android or whatever, and at least one or twice a year Chrome would push a broken version. It's odd, as before that I would have put Google's code quality above Mozilla's. At least for Chrome/Firefox it's not, and the difference is large.

Even if Googles QA process was triple as good as Mozilla's, the users would still see more breakage.

Risks like that scale closer to the number of features/number of Devs, since Devs can be fiddling with server side config outside the release process.

I am not commenting on your whole comment but I noticed I am looking more and more on reddit for randomnumber45123's advice than listicles or press review articles that haven't used for 6 months the product I am considering buying.

Of course I just add "reddit" to my google query. I heard something was going on with google and reddit though (no irony, just hadn't time to check out what it's about yet).

Reddit search sucks, in my experience I get much better results using Google vs Reddit search.

You forget something. Reddit's search engine has historically been absolute dogshit. In fact there was a short time period it just opened a google window back in the day because they struggled to get it to work. It's gotten better in recent years but it's relatively meh compared to just having google search the reddit domain. Lol

If the decision will not be bad for Google, then why would Google spend so much money and time to defend against it.^1

Why not just stop making the anti-competitive payments and terminate the agreements. Money saved. Problem solved.

We can now safely say it is not a defense to claim "Google is the best" and that's why people choose it. Anti-competitive conduct is illegal. Whether it is prudent or not. It makes no difference whether the payments were actually "necessary".^2 Google made them anyway, repeatedly.

1. Even more, this "prediction" implies there will be an appeal ("... if this ruling holds."). Why bother with an appeal if this decision has no negative effect on Google.

2. One only needs to show the conduct had an anti-competitive effect.

Please read the decision:

https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/f6ab5c36...

It’s only solved if nobody does it. If Google stops those payments unilaterally MS would just make a slightly cheaper deal with Apple..

I think this ignores Apple could still develop their own search engine, as they did with Maps, and pocket the ad revenue themselves.

Can we assume that if Microsoft paid Apple to be the default search engine in iOS instead of Google then Microsoft would have market share, or some other source of monopoly power, sufficient to allow the DoJ and state AGs to bring essentially the same antitrust case against Microsoft.

There is this ridiculous "argument" from HN commenters I see sometimes, too often, when "developers" or so-called "tech" companies they work for are caught doing something wrong. It goes something like, "If we didn't do it, then someone else would have so don't blame us."

Apple might make their own search engine. Apple has a team that's been creating a next-generation search engine codenamed Pegasus under John Giannandrea. They already have search engines for App Store, Maps, Apple TV and News and Spotlight.

Apple web search development worked as bargaining chip in pricing negotiations with Google. Google paid them $20 billion per year to not compete as much as keeping other competitors away.

Microsoft has of course tried but Bing is only really propped up by Microsoft's deep pockets. It's not a profitable enterprise (AFAIK). And this is with Microsoft using every trick they can to bypass EU and US consent decrees and legislation to trick users into Bing. Microsoft has poured billions into Bing.

Apple rejected Google Maps and launched their own Maps product in 2012. Obviously they consider this core to their business so I get it. But even with Apple's resources, it's taken more than a decade for Apple Maps to reach some parity with Google Maps.

It's really hard for a goose to lay a second golden egg. With Microsoft, it's their Windows/Office monopoly. With Apple it's the iPhone. Google is an outlier among outlier because they do have several golden eggs but one is much bigger than all the others (ie search).

Think about it. If Apple makes $300 billion in revenue selling iPhones (made up number), how would as an internal leader try and build a search engine? The iPhone will always take absolute priority, mainly because your search engine is such a drop in the revenue bucket. But without these resources and this priority it'll never grow big. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Sometimes just throwing money at a problem just isn't enough.

[1]: https://technologizer.com/2009/05/19/a-brief-history-of-goog...

[2]: https://searchengineland.com/neeva-shutting-down-427384

Also, states are different than they used to be, but there is still a lot to learn from history, and you often see that similar struggles get fought over and over, or similar mistakes get made. Verdun has been a major battleground in WW1 because that's where Charlemagne's legacy got split up. As another example of a phrase still relevant today, there is "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_no_one_rid_me_of_this_tur...

> In the 2023 fiscal year (ends on June 30), Microsoft reported $12.2 billion in search and news advertising.

Agree it is important to note this is not net, net seems to be about half according to article.

What "golden egg" do Google have besides an ad-selling business? Last time I looked into it ads of various forms accounted for basically all of their revenue, somewhere around 85% or more.

Google search, Maps, and GMail are the big 3 web services. These don't bring in revenue all by themselves, but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money. There's also Chrome (directs people to Google services and facilitates their use of those services). Finally, there's Android, which is a little different but like Apple, they get revenue from the Play Store on it, and again push users to use their own search engine and browser.

> but they bring users to look at ads which is where they make all their money Ad sales is their golden egg. Practically everything else is an egg truck to sell that one thing.

Ads by themselves aren't a golden egg. Users don't want to look at ads, and certainly aren't going to pay for them. That's why they came up with those other products, to sell ads to advertisers.

It's just like newspapers: historically successful papers like the NYT didn't get rich by doing great journalism and selling papers to people, they got rich selling ads, with the journalism being a way to get people to subscribe to the paper.

The pair of eyeballs are an integral part of the ad product that is sold to customers who buy ad spots.

Cows don't want to be eaten but burgers are absolutely McDonalds golden egg.

The only potential outlier is the cloud stuff, but even then I think it's essentially a 'economies of scale' thing, for the same reason Amazon started AWS, rather than a real revenue centre.

No, in fact, Azure's revenue is higher than that of Windows and Office combined [1]. Microsoft is far more diversified than Google is. Google has been trying for a decade to achieve Microsoft's diversification and has not succeeded (Bard being the latest such failure).

[1]: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/microsofts-revenue-by-produ...

   > They already have search engines for App Store

I’d say its pretty accurate and impressive 95% of the time to the point im impressed at how good its suggestions are considering it’s just the top 1 search.

There are some weird people in this thread

Sure, they could write their own search engine (they also don't do large compute - so they'd be getting it from someone they'd be paying) but Apple would be paying for compute and licensing ... and not have any revenue from it ... and get in trouble with anti-trust or monopoly issues in Europe to boot.

Writing a search engine isn't likely worth the headaches that it would bring to Apple.

Apple would not need to pay anyone to make their search (or maps or browser) the default. It would be the default on Apple devices and not used much outside of that.

Would that bother Apple? Their platform is the most valuable to advertise on. They’ll make money. The question is, will it make as much as Google was paying?

Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.

They will never make a search engine.

On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.

All the Reddit, twitter, Pinterest, and blog stuff can stay in the Google wasteland and gotcha ad links.

I maintain that the point that Google started going down the drain was when they embraced SEO instead of seeing those that try to game the search engine as adversaries.

> Like recipes only from actual chefs or publications, news from newspapers and networks

are the first-party garbage on the Internet? It's all content marketing written to push ads. Yes, including "recipes only from actual chefs" - chefs have better things to do than to maintain an on-line presence; if you see one, it's most likely a brand where the chef gets paid for the rights to their name, and any actual writing is done by marketing interns mashing together whatever they can find on social media.

In fact, if you really want authentic recipes from real chefs, your best bet is Reddit - there's bound to be a few bored chefs hanging around relevant subreddits, exchanging ideas and providing expert tips, just because it's a fun thing to do.

So yeah, search is bad and the web is a SEO wasteland, but the brands big and small aren't victims here - they're the ones who caused it, and who perpetuate it, because it's easier money than actually delivering something of value.

Just make your own damn search engine. You could even put Google's own ads on it to make some money that way.

This is a strange statement to be honest. Have you used google search in the last decade?

google search was awesome back in the very early 2000s. If you remember those times, you know how good it was.

That started deteriorating in the 2010s and it has become really useless in the last decade. Today google search results are mostly spam sites with autogenerated content along with sales and advertising sites. It can't find any of the actual user-generated honest content anymore.

Their only "agenda" is quite leaked at this point, it's to push ads. The more you have to dig, the more ads they get to show you. The more times they can show you ads, the more times they get to charge advertisers those pennies per show.

Not sure if that is true-competition laws often prohibit the dominant market player from doing certain things, yet still allow smaller players to do the same thing.

- Zero dollars

- More than zero dollars from a smaller search competitor (Bing? New AI player?)

I suspect Apple will want more than nothing. They also have quarterly financials to report.

- A new deal with another company is actually in the millions. There are a lot of numbers between zero > 20B that's currently being paid for that default setting.

- Said deal remains small and doesn't grow over time, even as a new competitor to GOOG starts eating away at their market share and spreads around search ad revenue.

(Personally, I wish monopoly law didn't seem so much like "vibes". It's really hard to answer whether the rule is fair when the same actions have different legal consequences depending on some vaguely-defined categories like "market sector").

As others have pointed out, these types of deals haven't been ruled illegal, they only apply to Google for abusing its monopoly.

Apple will want more than zero dollars.

Is this actually true?

Microsoft has bent over backwards trying making it inconvenient to get Chrome + Google on any new device. There's even the whole "Edge is the #1 browser to install Chrome" meme. Normies just really like Google.

Its not uncommon to search for product X, only to find product Z being ranked above the official store of X. Google search is advertisement first, quality second.

Bing may be equally crappy too. Microsoft "welcome to edge" page is a bunch of advertisement for Microsoft products and then in the corner there is a search window. I have not tested bing itself to see if their flood of advertisements are as bad as google, but I sure do not trust Microsoft. Windows start menu being overloaded with advertisements are a cautionary tale of what happen when Microsoft is copying google.

Normies do not like having advertisement being thrown in their face, but they will tolerate it if they have no choice or if the advertisement is hidden enough that they do not know that what they see is a bought listing.

I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action racketeering charge brought. And this is exactly how a protection racket works. You wouldn't want some other brand in the top position when they search for your brand term. You should just pay us to make sure that doesn't happen.

While I was at eBay, there was a company announcement praising one executive who had noticed that eBay spent a lot of money on placing Google ads for searches like "ebay", when obviously someone searching for "ebay" can find it in the search results. He canceled the ads, and it worked! There was no significant decline in traffic.

But that's a problem for Google, and the situation you describe is the obvious solution. If people won't advertise on searches where they should appear in the actual results, the way to get them to advertise is to stop having actual results.

Since W11 I've seen much more _normies_ use Edge and the result is that they are using Bing for their searches.

On the other hand, Google is the default on Android's Chrome and iOS' Safari, so they use Google there.

Meanwhile if the search bar works when typing things in and gives you good results, I think a lot of people will be fine with whatever.

Yes and no.

Yes, it has been demonstrated time and time again that most people do not go and change the defaults even if they could. Most people actually prefer having less dials, even if they say they want more dials.

No, because Chrome isn't the default in Windows (ChromiumEdge), MacOS (Safari), iOS (Safari), most if not all the Linuxes (Firefox), and most if not all the BSDs (Firefox). Chrome is only the default browser in Android, but Android is a Google operating system so this shouldn't be a surprise. Also, this is one of the most spectacular exceptions to most people not changing defaults.

Remember that Google was paying Apple 20 BILLION for the privilege, and a key reason they had an antitrust case against them!

Chrome utterly dominates Edge on Windows, despite Edge being default.

How do you explain that?

The reality is that people know what they like, and most will switch to the thing they like most. Especially when it costs nothing.

To say defaults don't matter because Chrome is used on Windows is a bit absurd. Chrome in 2012-2014 was still trading blows with IE even after the tremendous shortcomings during the Windows 8 and 8.1 era. This was a time when everyone was telling people to not use IE, and yet it retained ~20% use. Nothing like now where Chrome dominates ~70%.

Further, anytime a user has to connect to an account for email, calendars, and other essentials, the OS will direct them through the native browser app. This means the so-called "popularity" reflects little more than the number of active devices: Android > iOS > Windows.

Obviously, defaults matter to some degree. They have a price. Google and Apple are companies with market caps in the trillions, and at their scale the default has a price in billions, since a small shift redirects a ton of ad revenue. That's fine.

But they're not "incredibly powerful", which implies that most users won't change them. As I pointed out, most users do change from Edge to Chrome.

If defaults were so "incredibly powerful", Edge would be winning. Obviously, therefore, they're not. Defaults have a small-to-medium amount of power. (Which, at Apple+Google scale, happens to be a lot of cash.)

This is HN's regular reminder that market cap measures the value of the company in the eyes of investors, not its revenue or profit.

Apple had gross revenue of $365 billion and Google $257 billion in 2021, the year in which Google paid Apple $26 billion.

That means that in that year Google paid Apple a solid 10% of their revenue and Google's payment accounted for 7% of Apple's gross revenue. To put that in perspective: that puts this deal on the same scale of importance as a car payment or utilities are for the average US household.

For now. Don't expect it to last: Edge is just a re-skin of Chromium, so after V2 support is completely removed by Google, Edge will have to follow along or fork the code.

Some defaults can absolutely be over ridden by a non-stop barrage of interstitial pages and ad banners imploring your to install Chrome because all the default tools you use are Google sites, which just circles back to defaults mattering.

Launch Edge > Search "Google" > Bing displays Google Search link > Click > Google Search tells user to install Chrome > User installs Chrome > Google maintains browser and search engine monopoly

Browse the web as a normie would, without adblocker/etc extensions and other techy web saavy, and it should quickly become apparent why. Telling people to google something is like telling them to wade into a sewer.

What will happen is that people will use Bing without knowing it and then complain that “Google is broken”. To many people, search is google in the same way that a Kleenex is a tissue.

These days Chrome just has so much mind-share that it overcomes the defaults on Windows. This is by no means a common outcome. This is anecdotal, but I know far more people who use Safari instead of Chrome on macOS than who use Edge instead of Chrome on Windows; Microsoft just has such a bad reputation when it comes to browsers that Chrome is able to get over that defaults hump on Windows. But a lot of people genuinely like Safari, and trust Apple in general, so the effect is (somewhat) lessened on macOS, even though IIRC Chrome still does have the lead in market share there. Just less of one, percentage-wise.

Chrome was a much better browser compared to the default that came installed on Windows, and certainly if someone is going to switch away from the default they will do it towards a much better alternative, on that we agree.

However, despite how much I think Google as a search engine has declined in quality, I still find them to be significantly superior to the alternatives, such as Bing and even DuckDuckGo (which I believe predominantly makes use of Bing) and that people will switch from whatever default search engine Apple sets to Google.

Apple doesn't have this problem.

Your article says that Microsoft themselves were working to move people away from Internet Explorer 6 and encouraging people to upgrade to a modern browser by declaring IE 6 to be at its end of life.

The article says that Youtube displayed a banner recommending users to upgrade to either Firefox, IE 8, or Chrome and that due to concerns by Google's lawyers, the order of the browsers was to be randomized so to avoid the appearance of giving undue prominence to Chrome. Finally the article ends by noting that each of the three options Youtube recommended were chosen equally as opposed to Chrome being the option picked by most people who saw the banner.

This sounds like the exact opposite of shoving it down peoples throats and instead trying to be very careful to move people away from a browser that Microsoft themselves had declared was dead, and onto an alternative option by trying to be as fair as possible.

The significance of your article isn't that Google shoved Chrome down everyone's throat in order to kill off a competitor, it's that due to its popularity and dominant position, Youtube was more effective at getting people to stop using Internet Explorer 6 than Microsoft was, but both companies had the same objective.

Here is an article about Microsoft's own "Friends don't let friends use Internet Explorer 6." which discusses Microsoft's own efforts to get people to stop using IE 6. It's about the same period of time as the article you mentioned.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-friends-dont-let-fri...

Ah well, c'est la vie!

Let's see:

- huge ad banners promoting Chrome

- literally almost singlehandedly killing IE 6.0

- sabotaging Firefox: https://archive.is/tgIH9

This... this is not ancient history. It happened 10-15 years ago. Unless you're very young, and I've fallen under the curse of the old age:

--- start quote ---

One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well

--- end quote ---

Yes, putting a single button with vague words in front of users almost always gets a lot of clicks, which we've known for decades, and it turns out, if you have the attention of nearly the entire web-browsing world, you can put that button in front of people's faces way more than your competitors. It should have been considered billions of dollars of free advertising for Chrome that should have been assessed against them somehow.

It's blatantly unfair and should have been shut down in literally days, but nooooooooo we aren't allowed to have regulation here in the states.

An interesting thought experiment might be to imagine if Chrome was actually somehow the default browser on Windows and/or macOS. I think we could expect Edge's and/or Safari's market share numbers to be much lower than they are now if that were the case.

Using market dominance to enter other markets is the problem…

I say this as a heavy apple user myself btw.

If I could donate to Firefox development, I would've a long time ago for a generous monthly sum, but since I know it's just going to be squandered by becoming another advertising company [1], then I'm not too bothered by it.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-anonym-raising-t...

That’s just a waste of money then. Why are they paying bilious to Mozilla and Apple? Because they’re good buddies? Wouldn’t people use Google anyway?

Just imagine the Google CFO looking through the finance spreadsheets last year and instead of going “let’s layoff a whole bunch of people” they go with “let’s stop paying Apple and Mozilla” for default search.

This would be a great thing for Firefox. That Google money is toxic in more ways than one.

But for more everyday, non-programming things, I've frequently found the regular DDG results (from Bing) actually better and less filled with SEO crap than Google's.

They had a good product, but have screwed it up. Have you tried Kagi?

I dipped my toes and have never looked back, not once. It’s quick, it’s good, I have some neat customisation. The less-geeky family have joined me. The downside? It’s paid. But it’s worth it.

Then Google came along and ripped them all to shreds from 1998-2006 or so. The most important platform was Windows and Google gained dominance there without paying anyone. Sure, you can argue Microsoft didn't take it seriously (because they didn't).

Then Microsoft did start taking it seriously and the smartphone revolution happened. If you were around at the time, you may remember that many networks simply couldn't handle the anticipated (and actual) Internet traffic from iPhones. IIRC I saw figures that an iPhone user used >8x as much data as the most recent Nokia phone user with Internet connectivity. Why? Because using a browser on an iPhone was a quantum leap forward in terms of power and usability.

Bing was really the only serious threat here simply because Microsoft had deep pockets. So Apple was able to extract (extort) Google to keep it as the default search on iOS.

Bing tried exclusivity deals, most notably with Bing but it was short-lived. Google also pays Firefox but it's less than they earn from that user and no one else can afford that. If no one else can do the same Google wins.

But the main point is that when given a choice, the majority of people choose Google because it is better for most people.

Where exclusivity typically hurts is where it's used to push an inferior product or at least a product where the product isn't preferred.

Now the DoJ could argue that we want to avoid getting to the point where Google has an inferior product but has the market domination and deep pockets to keep out competitors. Maybe that's valid. But I think in the short-to-=medium term, this has simply saved Google billions of dollars a year.

Also, for smaller search engines like DDG, they can never afford the billions Google could Billions was material, even to Apple. What DDG could pay isn't. It's not worth taking.

I don't think the search problem was considered solved. More like unsolvable. Some new search engine would show up every so often and be good, but fall into the same terrible abyss of mediocrity as all the others in 6-12 months. Thus the meta-search engines like DogPile that would search "all" the search engines and give you a blended result.

Google disrupted that by continuing to be good for at least 10 years before it fell into mediocrity. Unfortunately, the web has gotten so big that developing a new search engine is very expensive, and (IMHO) there hasn't been a new good search engine since Google. I've moved to DuckDuckGo, but I think it's only good enough, not good. I was at Yahoo when they launched their self-hosted search in 2004 and it was good, but they couldn't get enough marketshare to keep investing in it.

I remember searching AltaVista for GNU’s website (at the time, they didn’t have their own domain, or weren’t using it) and I’m pretty sure I had to go to page 2 or 3 of the results to find it.

IE was so bad and Chrome so much better that Microsoft gave up on IE on their own platform and switched to Chrome as the engine for edge.

Given the last 25 years of history, Google's product has gotten worse after these default deals. Previously it established the dominance because it found whatever a user searched for. Arguing otherwise just feels unrealistic. They never had any exclusive deals with any provider.

Edit: Changed exclusive to default.

These are deals around defaults, not exclusivity.

Google never paid Apple to remove Bing from the list of choices. That's what an exclusivity deal would do. But it didn't happen, because this doesn't have anything to do with exclusivity.

The point was they became a monopoly cos they had a good product, and now the product is not as good after these default deals they made with Apple, Samsung etc.

Furthermore it doesn’t cut it to be marginally better than Google Search when they’re the default search engine. You have to completely blow them out of the water and for that you likely need long term, sustained investment to pour into R&D. How many VCs are willing to play that long game and invest when you have an incumbent paying $20B+ to block user choice?

The creation of Firefox and Google Chrome are examples of competition that tremendously benefited consumers, but which took many years to play out, after the government ruled against monopolistic behavior.

More than that, it's the de facto default for anyone who can be bothered to change it. It also reminds me of the Dvorak keyboard. It's somewhat better than the competition, but not better enough to justify changing. Google's search competitors are trying, but they're not obviously much better.

This is the key.

I'm not saying Google couldn't be better. But if it were possible to build a better index of the Internet, Google would do it.

Spam garbage overrunning the web is the underlying issue.

If the goal was to have the best index, they would actively punish sites that use SEO to push sites that are nothing more than auto-generated affiliate links to Amazon products. I quit using Google a while ago, because that’s all I was getting. I use Kagi now, which had no ads. Without this conflict of interest, I find things go better.

After this ruling: since nobody gets to buy being the default whatever users want to be the default will be selected. Judging by market share it will be google for $0.

or bing pays to be the default? or apple choose to give some upstart like duckduckgo a chance? Or they produce their own search engine (not that i think they will).

The ruling doesn’t say exclusive distribution agreements are illegal. It says Google can’t enter into them.

Stupid them then. I don't and now I won't have to see Google defaulted to everywhere.

This is great news. If Mozilla can't afford to provide Firefox anymore then they could ask for donations or provide a paid product. I'd pay for firefox if they stripped out the google and pocket crap.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/

I switch to Kagi about a year ago and had a much better experience. My browser defaulted itself back to Google one day, and I didn’t notice the heading but when I looked at the results I recoiled in disgust at how bad it was. I looked at the top of the page and saw it was Google. That was the last time I used Google and it wasn’t even on purpose.

Several times now at work, I’ve joined a call where people had been troubleshooting for hours trying to find an answer to some issues, presumably using Google a lot in the process. I end up using Kagi, finding an answer, and the call wraps up 15 minutes later. This has happened at least 3 times now, and I’m not on these types of calls often.

It’s so nice to be the customer and not the product.

Google search sucks. I didn't switch to DDG. Any competitor is going to have a hard time breaking in because of Google's paid exclusivity deals. That's part of why Google sucks. Google won easily in the early days because it was considerably better in a wide field of competitors it wiped out. It's not too hard to believe that Google would return better results if anyone was competing.

My web search has degraded to only searching for things I know already exist or occasionally fighting Google to try my damndest to get it to do an exact text search which is a stupid amount of struggle.

Then they wouldn't have those deals in the first place.

Companies don't just piss off money for no reason. And the reason is simple: They want no competition - they strictly maintain their dominance through them.

Just saying "No" isn't enough. You have to explain why they have those deals if you think this isn't the reason why. Otherwise, anyone reasonable must disagree by default.

Let's think of an alternative where browser are forced to even the playing field: the browser either presents users with a list of search engines in random order, or perhaps it even chooses a random default.

You'd see a world where search engines can run ads that say "click this easy button/download our app/do this really easy thing" to use our search engine.

You would also see smaller search engines being able to get on the Safari search engine list instead of just the ones that can pay Apple what I assume are huge fees.

Let's not forget that iOS and iPadOS commands a huge share of the most affluent customers who would be most willing to use paid search engines. But in the status quo even those willing to do so will find Apple's platforms to be less than accomodating.

there is also Android ecosystem, where DOJ may ask google to prompt user with Search Egnine selection dialog, and Google can easily lose some significant share of traffic to Bing/ChatGPT/etc.