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Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
11–20 of 32 posts
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google didn't give Apple 20% of their revenue for the year, they were responsible for 20% of their profit. AAPL is $2.8T and their P/E is 28. They earn about $100B a year. And if I'm recalling their profit/revenue ratio correctly, that's $100B on about 400B in revenue. Making Google's money 5%, not 20%. That's still a lot for a default URL.
The post says "almost 20% of Apple's profit", and you note the profit was $100B and the payment was $20B, making it 20% - is something going over my head?
Yes - all $20B isn't pure profit. It must take 25% of an engineers time to maintain the search box in safari. So lets say it is only $19,999,899,999 in profits.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#13Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership. This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year. It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client. It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company bl…
Search is a hard problem, and if they haven't decided to cut the $20 billion, it's because they believe Google is the best. I do think Google has been decreasing in quality over the years, but when I use any of the privacy focused alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Brave or Kagi, I end up using a !g bang every 2/3 searches. The others just aren't there yet, and they know that.
Google is pretty much unusable today if you don't look for specific websites. If you are using it to look up information, learn or discover new things in the web it is just SEO LLM spam. Features like shopping and LLM-powered Q&A are quite misleading and potentially dangerous for a trusting user.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#14Last week, as part of the US Department of Justice investigation, documents were released that showed Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to retain the search partnership. This is almost 20% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year. It’s never a good idea for a company to be so reliant on a single partnership or client. It distorts incentives, is high risk and sometimes, as in Apple’s case leaves a company bl…
Search is a hard problem, and if they haven't decided to cut the $20 billion, it's because they believe Google is the best. I do think Google has been decreasing in quality over the years, but when I use any of the privacy focused alternatives like DuckDuckGo, Brave or Kagi, I end up using a !g bang every 2/3 searches. The others just aren't there yet, and they know that.
I use Kagi everyday since a while ago and used ddg before that and almost never had to resort to google, personally. Even less with Kagi than w/ ddg.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#15I thought it was universally understood that Apple has been working toward ending its dependency on Google Search for about a decade.
One can witness the firepower of Apple's fully armed and operational search engine today, which is hidden in plain sight: https://imgur.com/a/SThluBm.
That said, Apple should not end its Google Search partnership until one of the following occurs: (1) it's strategically important for Apple to provide Safari's default search engine, (2) a government mandates that Google can no longer pay (or pay Apple) for the privilege of being Safari's default search engine, or (3) people stop preferring Google search by a wide margin.
(1) Making Apple Search the default for Safari would cost Apple $20 million per year, but could open up a bunch of new revenue streams and potentially provide a much better search experience for Apple users (especially if Apple's GPT partner isn't Google).
(2) If the EU mandates that Google can no longer pay-to-play in general, or can't do so with Apple in particular, no problem. Users will choose their search engine on a platform where Apple has a home-field advantage.
(3) In the extremely unlikely event that Google goes from hero to zero in search, boom — Apple Search is ready.
In summary, this is a terrible time for Apple to stop taking Google's money. They should wait until the GenAI players settle down, until the advertising part of the business matures and can capitalize on the change, and until governments stop looking for limbs to chop off.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#16I thought it was universally understood that Apple has been working toward ending its dependency on Google Search for about a decade. One can witness the firepower of Apple's fully armed and operational search engine today, which is hidden in plain sight: https://imgur.com/a/SThluBm . That said, Apple should not end its Google Search partnership until one of the following occurs: (1) it's strategically important for…
I think Apple Search is (sort of) already the default in Safari. The top result is (as far as I know) from Apple's search engine instead of Google.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#17"Apple Maps, launched in 2012, initially faced several hiccups and criticisms, but today, it arguably matches or exceeds Google Maps in many areas." - not in my experience.
Also, concerning the "partnership", it is impossible to configure Google Maps on iOS as a default map handling application. Due to EU legislation Apple must change this (in the EU only) but this is supposed to happen in iOS 18 or something (in 2025).
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#18I thought it was universally understood that Apple has been working toward ending its dependency on Google Search for about a decade. One can witness the firepower of Apple's fully armed and operational search engine today, which is hidden in plain sight: https://imgur.com/a/SThluBm . That said, Apple should not end its Google Search partnership until one of the following occurs: (1) it's strategically important for…
$ 20B a year is what google pays [1] + the cost of running and maintaining their engine.
$20B is a 1/6th of their operating margin for very little effort.
[1] this was revealed in the recent anti trust trial
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#19What is the alternative here? The default search position is very valuable. If Google didn't pay for it, someone else would. Should Apple auction it off but disallow Google from winning it? That seems maybe OK I guess?
Should Apple take it for itself and build a search engine? Ironically, this seems like it would make Apple guilty of exactly what many antitrust arguments decry at the moment: a company leveraging its position in one area to give itself a boost in another.
Re: Apple should end their Google search partnership (2023)
#20I thought it was universally understood that Apple has been working toward ending its dependency on Google Search for about a decade. One can witness the firepower of Apple's fully armed and operational search engine today, which is hidden in plain sight: https://imgur.com/a/SThluBm . That said, Apple should not end its Google Search partnership until one of the following occurs: (1) it's strategically important for…
They don’t ever include monetizable search results though, anything that would generate ad revenue goes off to google since the deal they have isn’t a flate rate, it’s a revenue split.
Apple knows enough to not use their search engine in place of anything with actual ad dollars attached to it.