[MBCook]

To a degree that’s Google’s fault.

Every person doing a search is a data point. Every result they go to is a signal. You can use that information to do a better job of providing relevant hits to good quality websites.

Google is good -> gets more traffic -> gets more signals -> Google gets better faster.

Everyone could do that. But Google gets the most traffic. They have the most popular browser. The most popular phone OS on earth. And they pay for that same advantage from the only other popular phone/tablet OS.

If someone else was the default search on iOS they could improve much faster than they do today and be a bigger threat to Google.

So Google pays.