Google Could Lose Default Search Engine Status on iPhone | Hacker News Reader

Google Could Lose Default Search Engine Status on iPhone

thenextweb.com

36 pointsevo_920 comments

Interestingly enough, a lot of the quality Apple has comes from the absence of choice. My parents don't want to choose which search engine to use -- they just want to get their questions answered.

Forcing Apple's products to give users choice can very possibly degrade the user experience.

If you have the time, I strongly recommend checking out the Barry Schwartz and Dan Gilbert talks at TED on choice ( http://www.ted.com/talks/tags/choice ). If you don't have time, my tl;dr from them: people like the idea of having choices, people dislike/avoid choosing, and people like things more simply because they chose them.

Also, the opposite is true:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_ch...

I switched to Bing on my iPhone, and I prefer the results to Google. The presentation is nicer, the results do an infinite scroll (which means less clicking on teeny tiny links), and the quality of the results is the same, if not better.

I'm no Microsoft fan, but I'd love to see Bing get some marketshare, just to reduce the single-search-engine hegemony.

I just tried setting mine to Bing and I'm not getting an infinite scroll, just a small "More results" link

After selecting "more results", the subsequent page shows "infinite results" after scrolling to the bottom. I don't understand why it doesn't do this on the first page.

Ah, I see it. It's probably because most people will find what they need after scanning the first page; it prevents the user from accidentally eating up bandwidth by looking at all the results.

i dont like bing outlook but i wanted to shift from google for similar reasons. i use binngle.com

It would be nice if DuckDuckGo were listed among the search engines on "Settings > Safari > Search Engine"

Or at the very least if there was a way to switch to an opensearch site as the default.

if jailbroken, do

  echo -e "# Redirect Yahoo to DuckDuckGo (for Safari Prefs) \n46.51.197.88    search.yahoo.com" | cat >> /etc/hosts

Then choose Yahoo!, obviously.

Really? As a geek and out of curiosity, I've tried to force myself to use it for a whole day to test its results, and gosh, they are really bad.

I know the difficulty to make a web search engine, and I appreciate DDG's effort on privacy, but as a customer, there is no way I would change Google for anything, not even Bing or Yahoo! They... they suck.

Here in Brazil, one of the major mobile carriers makes Yahoo the default search engine for Android phones. Go figure...

I haven't seen stats recently, but I know that as recently as a year or two ago, Yahoo had much more penetration internationally (ie, not US) than Google did. I'm not sure if that still holds, or if it applies to Brazil, but that may be part of it.

Google has almost 90% marketshare in Brazil. People love Google here (only this year Facebook overtook Orkut as the main social network), Chrome is also marketleader already.. Yahoo barely exists in Brazil, aside from a few emails.

I wish more handheld browsers would allow any search engine. I'm pretty sure the first Nintendo DS browser allowed you to use any by giving it the URL of the search page and having it append your query to the end of it. Unfortunately, the last two versions of the Nintendo DS browser (and others like Opera Mobile) only allow Google and Yahoo!.

Creighton replied, ”Senator, what I was—first, it was a default, not an exclusive. So if you go on your I-Phone, I think it’ll probably take you about 20 seconds to download another app or a different search engine.”

Comments like that make it seem like these guys don't really get the internet...

Can you explain what you mean? I see nothing wrong with the comment.

Also, the internet really is a series of pipes.

Those statements were made by Google's lawyer.

What's wrong with her comments? I think "download a different search engine" is a pretty good set of laymen's terms for what happens when you visit http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bing/id345323231?mt=8 on your iPhone and click "install".

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