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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Google should let it lapse, nothing would say that iOS devices are no longer the cool thing to own then having Bing or a lousy Apple brewed search engine be the default.

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Why not just present users with a choice? I imagine no more than a single digit percentage would choose something other than Google, but it'd be enough to hit them and send a message.

I'd also be interested in the potential legal angles here: since Google are competing with Apple in a separate market, are they allowed to use their position as search leader to harm Apple? (e.g. by not offering similar deals it offers to other organisations like Mozilla, knowing that Apple doesn't have a choice but to use them anyway?) I suspect not, at least now now Bing is a viable alternative, but maybe a few years ago it'd have been a different story.

If you present users with a choice, they'll still choose Google and Apple gets nothing. Make it the default, and Apple gets a cool $1B.

"A billion here, a billion there and soon we're talking about real money" ;-)

There's not that much of a difference between Google and Bing. Most of us are using Google for historical and cultural reasons - it's what we've used in the past and it's just what people like us do.

This claim is the basis for the Bing v. Google challenge (bingiton.com). I tried it, and preferred Google, mostly because I'm usually searching for technical terms.

There is enough of a difference that when I decided to test with Bing and then Duck Duck Go (Fuck that name is complicated to type) for 2 weeks each I was missing Google's MUCH better results for the same queries. In the Bing it on challenge for example, Google wins 5 out of 5 for me.

>There's not that much of a difference between Google and Bing.

Exactly why it would be damaging. People still think of Bing, etc, as second tier despite similar results.

Google are paying Apple. If Google said "no", and Apple cared, Apple could still make Google the default. Then Google would look pretty silly for previously paying them.

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