What If Google Wasn't the Default?
matt-rickard.comThe fascination with Apple developing their own search is a little weird. That is not direction we'd want to go in. It seems that we'd be better of if the companies providing search was different from the device maker or operating systems and browser developers.
Agreed. Apple has the resources to go into a lot of businesses they don’t necessarily want to be in and they seem happy enough with the Google arrangement. They like to own and control the technologies core to their products, but even they have to draw a line otherwise they’d be building and running their own fabs.
Plus Microsoft also has a lot of money and talent and have been in the search business a very long time. Bing still sucks. Windows Live Search sucked before it, and MSN search before that. There’s no guarantee Apple could meet or beat the threshold of being at least as good as Google, only that they could, technically, if they wanted to, develop their own, and then they would be the ones the DOJ is going after over the default search engine in Safari (not to mention the punks on the EC would probably find some new law to craft targeting Apple, so it had really better be worth the investment if they were ever going to build a search engine because the price for doing so is going up).
> Bing still sucks
If I were to form a search habit today I don't think I would grade Bing lower than Google.
Google has gotten way worse and Bing way better.
Bing seems to respect the user's querries more too.
Try Yandex next time.
It searches exactly what you look for, and has no 'removed for piracy' search deindexes.
Power of not being within reach of the US copyright cartel. (Bought by being in the grasp of another, even worse one.)
And?
At least our information won't easily cross those territorial boundaries.
and their reverse image search is way better
I'm angry that I have to agree here. I use DDG and Bing primarily and Google as a fallback. Increasingly since I started doing so, Google's results were just as bad as what DDG or Bing would provide. I've downright given up on trying to search certain things because I know exactly how search engines will misinterpret what I'm asking for no matter how much I clarify because the thing they try to find is more popular (in terms of number of results) than what I'm actually asking for.
The other thing is that it's not clear what differentiation, if any, Apple could possibly want to target in Search.
Apple Maps is sometimes nicer to use than Google Maps, but also was developed because at one point Google refused to give Apple turn-by-turn navigation, which would make it hard to sell iPhones as a phone with equal GPS capabilities as Android. There isn't really a search function that Apple needs and does not get via Google.
> Bing still sucks
Bing is actually really really good these days, but was it worth the investment? I can understand that Microsoft want some of that R&D money back, but I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private and then thrown Bing in Googles face without the ads and tracking, just to prove that "the big boys" make money on selling actual products, not their users. Sadly that wasn't the world we got, at least they resell Bing to more privacy focus companies.
> I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private
Why would they do this? It makes zero sense. There would be zero (or really negative) ROI for doing as you suggest here. They already have a near-monopoly on desktop OSes, and these improvements you want aren't going to change that or improve the profits they get from the Windows business. It would have been colossally stupid for them to spend a ton of money making Windows "better" instead of what they did, which was to spend money on other projects, and to inserts ads and other annoyances into Windows while doing the bare minimum and also gutting their QA team. MS isn't losing any money on Windows from security problems, ads, or any other things you might think are problems.
>just to prove that "the big boys" make money on selling actual products, not their users.
Except that wouldn't have worked, because that's not what makes money now. The users have proven they don't care about high-quality products, especially for OSes.
You are 100% correct, I'm just sad that this is the state of modern business practices and mindless focus on profit above all.
It would never fly, but I'd much rather see better and safer product than another 20% on Microsofts bottom line. Business people would call me a commie.
I'd rather see people simply switch to a better (and generally free) alternative, but they don't want to do that for some reason... It's like the old saying about a horse and water.
I just rediscovered the difference between the two this morning.
I was trying to find some half-remembered meme images to share with a friend, and I couldn't find it in ddg. appending "!g" and... first 10 results are correct. It's remarkable how good google is when searching for things that are popular, and how far it's fallen for non-popular specific technical queries.
> but I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private and then thrown Bing in Googles face without the ads and tracking
I too wish more companies existed that didn’t sell out their users but what you’re asking for was never Ballmer’s Microsoft’s MO, and it doesn’t seem to be the case for Satya Nadella’s Microsoft either based off the reporting I’ve been reading on the increased enshittification of Windows 11 over time.
I am increasingly finding myself using ChatGPT powered Bing over Google (or rather, DuckDuckGo) for my daily driver.
Bing chat is amazing and much better than plain Google for information search.
Yes, it also would misaligns their incentives. I like (love) that Apple is NOT in the advertising business and fewer phd engineers obsess about how they can make me click/view more ads.
Maybe Kagi proofs that "search" could also be financed by a premium subscription? Or being a system service which is subsidized like Siri? But I think the ad-model is the most easiest/profitable for search so there is always a pull to it.
Doesn't Apple make billions selling ads?
https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/15/apple-ad-business...
Somehow yes,... I'm still very interested in how that works. I doubt it's wrong, but I only see ads in the app store, surely that cannot be worth that much, if so: Apple is overcharging big time on those ads.
Apple News, Stocks
Also the 36% they get from Google showing ads on search.
That revenue is significant and would have to be replaced.
Kagi is still fundraising & most of your subscription fee goes to sourcing results from Google. We don't know yet if it will be a sustainable business model.
Where are they fundraising right now?
Isn't the obvious reason that search is perhaps the best service to sell ads for? And Apple has the benefit that the cult would be extatic to be walled off even tighter.
I don't think Apple search would provide any tangible benefit for Apple users, nor do I hear any regular iPhone users express any desire to have Apple search, they just use the default. It might benefit Apple though, but why spend money on developing search when you can just use Google and get 36% of the revenue.
The whole wanting a 100% Apple ecosystem isn't something I think many a clamoring, except perhaps the few insane hardcore Apple fans. Also currently the alternative is pretty much locking yourself into a Google ecosystem and that's worse.
Apple of course does what benefits Apple, regardless of whether it benefits the user. 100% is 64 percentage points more than 36%. And due to the lock-in Apple could do away with significantly worse search than Google.
I agree that the heavy and intentional un-interoperability of Apple products is not a benefit for the users (although some hardcore claim it is). E.g. Apple clearly benefits from preventing sideloading (to force the App store rake) or alternative browser engines, but hard to see this having at least net benefit for the user.
The Big Tech companies all seem to follow the same pattern. They create a killer product, become successful and print money for a while, and at some point they all make the same decision...they all start creating the same suite of products: mail, instant messaging, video hosting (long-form and short-form), video conferencing, search, etc.
I guess I kind of understand the motivation, but it seems so wasteful.
And if their founders become multi-billionaires, they all also start a space rocket company.
We've all benefited though - we've gotten awesome free email and maps
Google is quite sticky indeed. Having tried a few alternatives, I keep coming back to it because it helps me get things done the fastest. It would be relatively easy for Apple to switch their default search engine, but quite difficult to switch it to something better. That said I hope they do, and I hope to see more and better search engine competitors in the future.
Kagi and You.com are way better than Google. Searches are usually within 1 page result unlike Google these days peppered with so many ads that the thing I look for usually at page 10-20 range. The only downside is they are paid service. Google stickyness is because it is free using us as product just like Meta. If you forho it being free, Kagi and You.com are great alternative. DDG is also free but due to way it monetize, it lacks a lot of features to what Kagi and You provides.
I'll look into You.com. I gave Kagi a shot recently, paid for a month and set it as my default. To be honest, the results weren't good enough for me and I ended up cancelling my subscription. I am willing to pay that much for my search engine, but it has to do better than Google.
I use a strict adblocker, so finding what I'm looking for on the Google search results page is actually quite easy for me. I recommend checking out uBlock Origin[0] if you haven't already.
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Edit: You.com is a mildly interesting product, but not what I'm looking for at all. It has more ads than Google, and the default is to send my query to OpenAI and wait for it to spit some text out. No thanks
> I gave Kagi a shot recently, paid for a month and set it as my default. To be honest, the results weren't good enough for me and I ended up cancelling my subscription. I am willing to pay that much for my search engine, but it has to do better than Google.
That's surprising to me. I find Kagi's results to be better than Google most of the time. Sometimes they are really exceptional, with searches I thought would be tough taking me straight to the right page. Maybe it depends on what you tend to search for.
I'm glad to hear it works well for others, and I'd like to give it another shot sometime. I use Google to find relevant sources for research, and documentation for coding projects. In my experience, Kagi just wasn't able to keep up.
There are other benefits to Kagi that I do miss though. I liked being able to permanently disclude domains I am not interested in, and to boost the relative importance of others.
When you experienced a bad result, did you do a direct comparison with the equivalent Google search?
I found myself questioning some of Kagi's search results when I first started using it and sometimes thought a search result was of poor quality, but whenever that happened, I did a direct comparison with Google whose result was equally bad.
I've now used Kagi for almost six months and have never found a search where Google provided better quality results. Except for image search.
I tried kagi with the free trial offer and liked it a lot. However, i was not converted to a paying customer.
I don't actually really know why. There is nothing technically that makes me hesitate. When my trial was over, and I stared at the form for my credit card I kinda went "nah I'm good. I'll go back to google for now, i can switch when i really need to". I never really needed to.
I converted to paying on kagi the promise that the first tier was enough for most users. It was not, and I didn't considered I would be a heavy user before hand. 2nd tier price is not acceptable to me since the UI/UX is not polished enough (search input reset is not something that should slip in production ever). I also had to revert to google for shopping results, kagi is suppose to have some, but not for me apparently.
I might try again is the raise the search count on first tier or provide services I care for on the second tier.
They recently changed the pricing. It's now $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited searches.
I'm on the $10 because it seems I do about 600 searches a month.
For me it's a bargain, I could never go back to Google.
Same. I was around 600 too. And I hope to never go back to Google.
You.com seems to be an AI assistant, not a search engine?
I switched to Kagi and really like it. It really shows you what's possible when you're not optimizing for ads.
Lots of cool functionality like:
Lenses: Allows you to run a search to prioritize certain domains to give you a particular "lens" to view it through.
Personalized results: Allows you to give additional weight or decrease the weight of certain domains.
Search Bangs: Shortcuts for executing the search somewhere else like Reddit, Wikipédia, Google, etc.
I decided to pay for it not because of the ads or privacy or anything else but because it allows me to make "search" work better for my needs.
> Gmail works best on Chrome.
Is this true, and if so, in what way?
> Google Docs uses cutting-edge features first (or only) found on Chrome.
Such as?
(I haven’t been a Google user for over six years, but back then neither of these were true, to my knowledge—if anything, Gmail worked better on Firefox due to significantly lower resource usage—and I can’t imagine what could have changed. Google Meet I’d understand, working properly depends on I think it’s WebRTC stuff Firefox still hadn’t shipped last I heard, but nothing that would be relevant for Gmail or Google Docs leaps out at me.)
I know I’ve heard at times of Google doing inappropriate user-agent sniffing and sending a degraded experience unless your browser claims to be Chromium, but I don’t think that’s reasonable grounds for saying it works best on Chrome, when it’s deliberate/malicious (organisational malice even if no other form) and works just fine in other browsers if they just pretend to be Chromium in their UA string.
Google has pestered and bullied and underhandedly bundled people into installing Chrome, but through most of the time they’ve made any claims about it, they’ve simply been lies, plain and simple. (Most commonly, they made a claim that was true at first, but were still making the same claim years later when it was no longer true but rather the converse in some cases.)
> > Gmail works best on Chrome.
> Is this true, and if so, in what way?
I don't know about Gmail, but Google Translate won't let me use speech functionality in Firefox.
Tangential: Microsoft Teams mostly works in Firefox, but they have some arbitrary limitations: I can't call someone via Teams or pick up the phone if someone calls me via Teams. But I can make a video conference with someone who isn't at work, and the person I need to speak to. Or just use the iPhone app.
I'd expect similar things to be "broken by design" in Gmail.
> I don't know about Gmail, but Google Translate won't let me use speech functionality in Firefox.
Speech output works fine here (Firefox, Ubuntu 23.04). I remember needing to install some kind of system speech synthesis feature on my OS to get web speech to work, though, because Firefox doesn't have one of their own like Chrome.
As for speech input: Firefox doesn't implement the recognition part of the Web Speech API (demo here https://mdn.github.io/dom-examples/web-speech-api/speech-col...). In fact, every implementation is one with a browser prefix (https://caniuse.com/speech-recognition) so it's no wonder Firefox isn't supported yet.
As for Teams: Microsoft doesn't care about the 3% Firefox users they get and they simply don't test, that's my conclusion. Back when Teams simply threw up a "your browser is not supported" the whole thing worked 95% if you spoofed the user agent and the modifications to fix the rest weren't all that hard (Firefox has some audio input/output implementation differences).
FWIW, the initial versions of Chrome did not have Google as the default search provider - the first run experience had a dialog that made you choose between the top three search engines in your locale
All of those choices were bought in and had to pay the most amount for that region to win.
Google later even refused to say what the competitors were paying for that rank, so they probably just overbid themselves for a while now.
Note that they do this for Android, too.
The search engine choice screen in Android did have a bid model (and complicated EU regulation around it), but the search engine choice screen in the early versions of Chrome were not a bid model - we just felt it was a cool thing to do, but we removed it because practically everyone chose Google anyway and first run screens are bad for retention.
> Increased competition in mobile browsers.
Google is going to capture most of Safari's market share with Chrome. Users know Chrome, they use it on desktop, it's convenient to use it on mobile too.
> Refocus on Android.
With the iPhone market being what it is in the US, I don't see Google letting that just go.
> Apple’s Search Engine
Honestly, I think they just might do that. They have been moving the "service" direction for some time.
> Chromium competition
Microsoft would have made competition for Chrome if they didn't drop their own engine in favour of Chromium.
The more cynical view.
> Users know Chrome, they use it on desktop, it's convenient to use it on mobile too
New generation uses mobile before they even know desktop exists. Mobile first is real.
And by new generation I don't mean toddlers. I mean college freshmen.
If potential antitrust case againts Google search would be valid, could it be mitigated with Google making google search as a platform?
For example another company could run google search on example.com and give let's say percentage of that revenue back to Google?
They've offered that for a long time, e.g. Startpage, Mullvad Leta, and Kagi are supposedly using that API.
The pricing isn't public AFAIK, but a revshare like you suggest seems unlikely.
Google should be forced to spin out Chrome and Android and let each of them charge for defaults.
Why? Just 'cuz Chrome has been successful?