[happybuy]

Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership.

This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year.

It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client.

It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company blind to other opportunities it could be pursuing.

On top of it all, Apple’s search partnership with Google trades their customer’s privacy for search $ kickbacks.

Based upon all this, it should be time for Apple to end this partnership and pursue their own search solution.

[Daedren]

Search is a hard problem, and if they haven't decided to cut the $20 billion, it's because they believe Google is the best.

I do think Google has been decreasing in quality over the years, but when I use any of the privacy focused alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Brave or Kagi, I end up using a !g bang every 2/3 searches.

The others just aren't there yet, and they know that.

[happybuy]

Agree that Search is a hard problem.

So was Maps, but Apple committed the time, resources and focus to make it happen. In 2024, I would say the Maps initiative has been an overwhelming success.

As per the article, Apple already has a search solution in Spotlight, which though it hasn't been battle tested as a general web search solution, seems to be a great basis to improve and make better.

My concern is that due to their addiction to the Google partnership money, Apple don't even seem to be contemplating their own Search approach.

This is how we end up with monopolies in product areas as the big tech players, in effect, collude to not compete in core areas of business due to partnership agreements.

[chrisweekly]

Radically different experience here. When I used DDG by default for a couple years, I'd resort to !g maybe 10-20% of the time. For the last few months with Kagi, it's literally 0 times I've even been tempted. Paying $5/mo to be a customer and not the product, having my privacy respected, and enjoying consistent access to excellent search results is IME equivalent to switching from browsing without an adblocker to using ublock plus or trying reader mode for the first time. It's transformative.

[metabagel]

I have had the same experience.

[faeriechangling]

Google search results can be quite a bit better for local and commercial queries.

[frizlab]

I use Kagi everyday since a while ago and used ddg before that and almost never had to resort to google, personally. Even less with Kagi than w/ ddg.

[talldayo]

It's just a bit ironic that Apple keeps the lights on by paying with their user's privacy. If I was a Google executive reading this I'd be in stitches, this is exactly how you keep the ad economy going. Something tells me Apple doesn't even care anymore either, since they know there's only so many profitable options once their service revenue is regulated down to a trickle.

[jitl]

I also tried switching to DuckDuckGo for a bit, and then Kagi after reading rave reviews here on HN. I churned after about a week with Kagi as my default search engine in iOS Safari. It was too weak at contextually aware / local search in particular. It might do better for me on desktop which tends to be a bit more knowledge research focused.

[mrd3v0]

Google is pretty much unusable today if you don't look for specific websites. If you are using it to look up information, learn or discover new things in the web it is just SEO LLM spam. Features like shopping and LLM-powered Q&A are quite misleading and potentially dangerous for a trusting user.

[hinkley]

Google didn't give Apple 20% of their revenue for the year, they were responsible for 20% of their profit. AAPL is $2.8T and their P/E is 28. They earn about $100B a year. And if I'm recalling their profit/revenue ratio correctly, that's $100B on about 400B in revenue. Making Google's money 5%, not 20%.

That's still a lot for a default URL.

[refulgentis]

The post says "almost 20% of Apple's profit", and you note the profit was $100B and the payment was $20B, making it 20% - is something going over my head?

[IncreasePosts]

Yes - all $20B isn't pure profit. It must take 25% of an engineers time to maintain the search box in safari. So lets say it is only $19,999,899,999 in profits.

[sureIy]

Your math is off. They have to pay the engineers whether it’s towards Google or Microsoft. Those $20B are pure profit

[IncreasePosts]

No, if they deleted the search box and didn't need to maintain it, there would be no engineer required to maintain it.

[sureIy]

Makes zero sense. No search box will ever be dropped. If it’s not Google it’s Microsoft or Apple.