[adventured]

You're mistaking the context. You first acknowledged that Yahoo had to outbid Google to replace their search engine, which properly recognizes the situation: Google is replaced when it's outbid, or the real-estate owner otherwise has a better value gain to be had from other options.

In the case of Apple, they have numerous other highly valuable directions they could go with a piece of real estate on the iPhone, including selling it to Microsoft or Yahoo.

It would be like claiming that because every free app in existence isn't included by default on a phone, said non-included app/s must therefore have a negative value. My phone for example did not come with kik or viber pre-installed, therefore they have a negative value (not true).

[ascagnel_]

It's worth noting that non-search bar system searches (eg through Siri) are run through Bing. I'm not aware if this was a policy decision (give less power to Google) or a monetary decision (MS paid in an effort to push up Bing's numbers).

[wodenokoto]

I don't agree. An iPhone without search is a really poor smartphone. An iPhone without Kik is not a poor smartphone.

Few people consider yahoo or bing search comparable in quality to google.

So what parent finds odd, is that Apple is asking the best in class to pay them, to improve their product.

[babuskov]

Many people don't consider search quality at all and just use what's served to them.

I understand that someone reading HN would find that hard to believe, but when I look at some people around me who are not working in tech - many wouldn't be able to tell difference between Bing and Google search results. All they know is they can type/say a query and get the site they are looking for. The only time they would start thinking about underlying tech. is if they started to consistently get unusable results.

Google results are better, but how many people are actually aware of that (outside IT crowd) is questionable.

[wodenokoto]

You are right that most people wouldn't know which search is better, but to say they don't care about the quality is ridiculous.

Maybe today Bing and Yahoo are competitive, but back when the iPhone was released, it was quite different.

[rokhayakebe]

many wouldn't be able to tell difference between Bing and Google

Tested and true.