Hacker News Reader

Comment by computerfriend | Hacker News Reader

> what's Apple gonna do otherwise, send all of its users to Duck Duck Go?

Now that they're not encumbered by the Google deal: build their own search engine.

> Now that they're not encumbered by the Google deal: build their own search engine.

"Encumbered"? Apple wants a deal with Google search. Apple is 'self-encumbering' themselves: Apple wants the deal so they don't have go through the rigamarole of building it themselves.

Building would cost a lot and they'd also not be getting cash from Google: so they're doubly hit.

"You mean I don't have to build a search engine, pay for it's upkeep and engineers, AND you'll give me money?" - Tom Cook probably circa > 0 AD

Easy for google to measure their IOS mobile Ad revenue to justify the billions.

They have the google deal specifically because they don't want to be in the search engine business.

> In a declaration filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, Apple Senior Vice President Eddy Cue said creating a search engine would require diverting significant capital and employees, while recent AI developments make such an investment "economically risky."

https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/zgvoalybovd/... declaration.pdf

Yeah, it would divert the $20 billion in capital that Goole currently pays Apple to not be in the search engine business.

Yup! And the fact that Apple has so far appeared completely uninterested in doing this (compare this to how aggressively Apple competes against Google Maps!) proves that this anticompetitive financial arrangement harms competition, which harms consumers (and probably even harms advertisers, since having Google Search in such a dominant position means Google has much more pricing power to sell ads than they would if a large chunk of iPhone users moved over to Apple Search).

Apple created maps because Google refused to implement turn by turn directions in the ios version of google maps (for a few years at least).

If I remember correctly apple wanted Turn by Turn navigation while also not adding any ads to the app (essentially be their maps but no revenue).

Apple was paying for Google Map data.

The actual Google maps app was released and had TBT before Apple Maps even came out. The previous/original “Maps” app was using Google map tiles but was written in-house by Apple. Whatever its feature lacks were is on Apple, and Google had already delivered that feature to customers, without Apple needing to spend all that money.

Posting because it's too late to edit, but I realized later that my above comment is wildly wrong. The "Actual Google Maps app" of course did not predate Apple Maps so my point is completely invalid. I regret the error.

I still assume the overall reasons for whatever Apple and Google each did amounted to greed, greed, and more greed.

Apple has enough spare cash to buy a small country. They can build a search engine if they wanted to.

There's a reason there are only a dozen or so successful search engines worldwide, and maybe five successful image search engines. The margins are razor thin, it's a constant battle against "SEO optimisers" trying to ruin search engines for profit, and the moment they get popular governments start coming up with very creepy requests and demands.

It'll cost them billions and they won't know if they can even beat Google before Google drops them as a client for trying to compete with them, taking out a lucrative multi billion dollar deal for a default setting.

No, I think they'll just contract Microsoft Bing and rid themselves of the risks. They're already incorporating Microsoft's side OpenAI side project into their service stack, so it'd just make sense to couple further. Maybe the American government will sue them for that deal as well, but before that's final there will be years of not decades of lawsuits and appeals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com