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Comment by paulpan | Hacker News Reader

The frenemy status of Google-Samsung is once again on display. Samsung probably hasn't been happy with the Google's continued Pixel phone push :p

But why is Google paying Apple to be the default search engine on iOS devices?

It seems a waste of money as Apple would be stupid to default to any other search engine given the lower search quality results. End users would notice if there was a result degradation and likely switch their default. Google seems to be playing the "Intel Inside" part without reaping the marketing benefits and only paying the traffic acquisition costs.

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If Samsung really wasn't happy, they wouldn't be manufacturing Google's phones and providing custom silicon. I think the Pixel phones are a blip on Samsung's radar in terms of competition.

Samsung also tried to push their own mobile OS for a long while after android become dominant. Samsung is large enough that it's hard to tell overarching strategy though.

You realize that before google paid, microsoft actually did it and bing was used in Siri even, right?

Apple may not consider any other default search engine only in the absence of a search engine other than google offering a pot of money to be the default search engine.

so without a default search engine what happens when you type some words in the address bar like every user has been trained to do?

The first time, you're presented with a prompt to choose your default search engine.

Or they’d ask users which search engine they’d prefer. Likely a non small amount would prefer chat-Bing just to try it out

Apple could spin up a better search engine than Google in a swirley. The big question is why haven't they!?

They already have one -- it's the iOS spotlight Web search

> in a swirley

What does this even mean?

Because they can't do it "in a swirly." It took them many years and a tremendous amount of money for Apple Maps to not be laughably bad.

They can absolutely build a solid search engine with enough money and time, but what would be gained? It's better to just collect Google's checks.

Why can't they do it? A tiny boot strapped company like Kagi has already made a much better search engine than Google. Are no good engineers working at Apple, or what is missing in the equation?

> but what would be gained?

People needing to buy an Apple device to reap the benefits of the internet, as Google continues to sink into their SEO-optimized malware swamp.

Siri can’t even find anything useful on my phone…

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