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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Google pays Apple ~$10bn a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. They pay Mozilla a significant percentage of Mozilla's revenue to be the default in Firefox. Obviously Google is the default in Chrome.

You can't compete with that by building a better search engine. Even if you had the infrastructure, capital, and you offered Apple and Mozilla more money than they get from Google, Google could beat your offer.

The only way someone could beat Google, or even just compete with them, would be if they could make everyone understand that they can change their default search engine and give them a reason to do it and have Google screw up how they respond. I wouldn't bet on it happening.

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You could lobby the govs to require search engine selection in browsers / device on first install. I don't think that would change anything though. Google's results might be declining but they are still arguably better than their competitors and ATM at least the majority of people would still choose them.

Duckduckgo wrote about this a decade ago. So much investment needed to just get on their list of search engines.

Meanwhile on Android, there's no practical way to completely move towards ddg for searched info unless you basically get rid of some voice and search features.

Without laws, Google set up an ecology of everything search related hits google one way or another. On Apple there are ways around it because Apple isn't a search company.

Having said that......... Most people don't care. It's why Microsoft pushes so hard for ie. Because they get to set the default which nobody will change.

What if an entity like the EU mandated that google make a public search index API, which would allow any competitor to create a low-cost clone. Google gets to stand as it is, relying on its brand and extra suite of tools to compete.

It's heavy handed, but if you view search indexing as a natural monopoly, it's relatively simple for how effective it would be at curtailing market power.

You could beat them in a small segment market though. EG: A group tired of being banned by google.

> EG: A group tired of being banned by google.

Huh? I don't understand what this means.

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