Doesn’t Google pay billions to Apple for the top spot? Why would they want to lose that stream of free cash?
If the goodwill they garner from that makes APPL go up because it matches the privacy expectation they are branding themselves with, they might be making even more money anyway.
Exactly. They are trying to win the privacy game, so a small sacrifice now could turn to be quite profitable.
Privacy theater*
Partially, but also partially it’s legit. I generally don’t have much positive to say about Apple, but they make pretty things and the privacy is generally better than most.
Of course, you pay through the nose for it.
It’s not privacy but exclusivity of data collection to apple
I believe they’ve been externally audited before, but I’m not positive.
Audited for what? And I don’t think they have.
To harm a competitors stock prices more than they are paying out
Could be that Apple will acquire DuckDuckGo. A little hasty to presume it I suppose, but Apple has to wonder how much money they are leaving on the table by taking Google’s payments. If Google will pay them more than $9 billion/year just to be default—what does that say about how profitable Apple’s absolutely huge and locked-in base can be?
Could apple be using the press as part of their bargaining strategy with google over the default search engine fee?
Only always
How is Apple going to monetize DuckDuckGo to make up for that $9 billion, without compromising their other efforts w/r/t user and data privacy?
How much do they monetize Apple Maps for? Sometimes companies just buy something to be a service supporting the thing they actually sell.
Rhey are going to sell ads on Apple maps.
Source?
Edit: I googled it. There is no source, basically just a guy claiming that would be logical for them to do but his timeframe is already proven wrong and Apple hasn’t announced anything.
efforts
I think the appropriate word here is marketing. There’s no real privacy in an Apple device.
What data privacy?
A Washington post article I was reading yesterday said google pays apple $19 billion this year to be the default browser on iPhones.
There is a big anti trust case against Google right now and this arrangement with apple is one of the topics of interest. If Google loses they could be forced to stop paying.
Who says they’re not negotiating a larger stream of cash?
With DuckDuckGo?
No, with Google. If Google pay Apple more, they might be more willing to overlook the reasons they’re looking to switch.
This whole thing is just negotiation theater. Apple never intents to switch.
Yes exactly. They just want to adjust the price.
I started using duck duck go a few months ago and have felt like my search results are a lot more useful since.
The maps function on it sucks though
DDG uses Apple Maps.
that explains that then
The maps it used were a lot worse, so this is a recent improvement
I wish they would use leaflet
Duck duck go sucks for porn I stopped using it a while ago. Until they fix that I’m out.
The man has priorities
Bing image search is surpringly efficient for this
Isn’t it the same search index?
Or piracy
Oddly enough I used DDG once for an artist and actually got results meanwhile Google gave me irrelevant shit
I’ve been using it this way for years. I don’t use google products at all now and don’t miss it.
Surprised to see so many plugging kagi in this thread. A subscription to search the internet seems crazy to me. Is it that good?
It’s like Google back in 2010. You find stuff you are looking for without pages and pages of ads, spam, and clickbait.
If you hit a domain which is obviously spam, you can block it forever. If you find a domain you really like, you can promote it for future results.
It’s clear that Google’s motivation is no longer to offer good results. It’s to maximise the time you’re on the site, and the number of ads and spam sites you click. Their goal is now, literally, to feed you bad results.
Every good result they serve you could have been an ad, so they’re incentivised to replace as many with ads as possible.
This article is a pretty good summary of why, by Google’s own words, an ad driven search experience will be rubbish:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics
Not only does Kagi produce great search results, as good as “old Google” IMO, its business model means the above cannot (or at least, shouldn’t) happen. If it ever changed its model to include ads etc it would collapse so fast.
So for me, unlike the other poster, I’d recommend it to everyone who’s finding the existing search engines are rubbish and full of useless Etsy and SEO etc links.
Pinterest links are the worst. I just don’t want that shit and images of random crap isn’t what I’m after.
I can’t find any information about their search engine crawler. Isn’t it standard for search engines to label their crawlers or something?
It’s conventional to do this, but a user agent string is entirely up to the client, and robots.txt is just a suggestion.
So for the best results, you probably want to mock Google’s crawler because it’s suicidal to block that if you want search traffic.
Brave words divorced from reality.
Cable companies wouldn’t insert ads, people pay for a premium experience with cable instead of getting their TV free over the air. If they did people would just cancel and watch free tv.
Then later: Streaming companies wouldn’t insert ads, the ability to watch on your time, terms and without interruption is part of the appeal, if they did their customers would leave them and they’d collapse. It would be the death of any company foolish enough to do so.
🤡
Markets and competition will save us cried the fool with no knowledge of history.
If they grow they need to keep growing, if their results are good enough they’ll introduce “limited” tracking for “trusted partners” with limited ads that are “valuable and relevant”. And from there it can spiral more but you’ve already lost.
As revenue, tracking, taking a big yearly check from Zuck or whoever to share your data with them. It’s a good source of revenue and unless this company is privately financed by one weirdo entirely out of their own pockets they have a responsibility to investors to get them ever increasing year over year returns.
Of course the typical thing to do is to get big enough first like streaming. Train the fool consumers to pay for something they’re getting for free, normalize that, grow, then sock them with ads, tracking, inconveniences and train them to accept more and more of it.
Brave words divorced from reality. 🤡
How would you estimate the likelyhood of kagi going the way you describe?
I mean I guess it could happen… so I guess why trust anyone? May as well just switch it all off!
Paying for a service ensures your incentives (mostly) align. Kagi’s incentive is to make a good search that makes you want to pay for it, google’s incentives are to gather your data to either sell or use themselves, and show you as many ads as possible.
I thought it sounded pretty silly, too. I gave the free trial a shot and for technical searches it was the best I had seen by far. Being able to lower certain sites and raise other sites makes it much easier to filter through shitty results like blog posts and stuff. I pay for it now and it’s worth it to me just for the time savings on technical searches. It definitely is still pretty far behind for things like local business info and stuff, but as a general purpose search engine it’s been extremely good for me.
I tried the trial for two days before I bought in and completely gave up google. Kagi is absolutely amazing and well worth the money, not just because there’s no ads or selling of your data, but because the search results are miles better than any alternative now. I have over 50k searches in my google history and at one point in my career I would average around a hundred searches a day. I know what I need from a search engine and Kagi absolutely gives it to me.
Yeah, I scoffed at the idea of paying. And paying $10/mo. Then I used it. And I keep using it. A lot. And now0 looks like I’m going to be paying for it for a while.
My experience doesn’t go past the free trial, but yes, it is very good. It’s basically Google-level search quality, but without the removal of features and dropping quality that Google itself experiences in the last few years.
That said, it’s still just a regular old search engine. If you used Google 10 years ago, you have a pretty good idea what this feels like. It doesn’t really do anything new or revolutionary. It’s not a “wow, this is amazing” experience, it’s just a “well, this actually works” kind of thing.
Not something I’d pay $10/month for, but if you want to move away from Google without it feeling like a downgrade, it’s currently the only real alternative. Bing, DDG (which is just Bing with window dressing), Yandex, BraveSearch are all still quite a bit worse than Google and even Google itself is nowhere near as good as it once was.
Recently I get good result with Ecosia.
I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone because it’s really expensive, but for me it’s great, and I save at least one hour a day at work since I don’t waste my time filtering the results from DDG or Google.
It’s subjective of course but I’m happy about it so far.
Yeah, it’s very good. Not having results full of shit like geeksforgeeks or Pinterest is nice, but possible with browser extensions. Being able to influence the rank of different sites, to either bubble up or down in your results is one of the secret killer features
I’ve been using duckduckgo for the last month and change and I’m not really a fan. Especially for things here in Japan, it can give really wonky results (today I was looking for the closest post office and searched ‘\ post office’. It gave me a website to get directions, but no indication of where it might be nor, y’know, even the post office’s website). Google has gotten continually worse for me, but this was, in most cases, just barely as good or worse.
It’s been my default for years. Usually I find what I want. When I don’t, I go back to the search box and put !g at the front, which sends the search to google.
!sp (Startpage) gives you the same results as Google but without personalized ads or ad tracking.
!s is actually enough
Thanks both! Will try to remember this for next time.
To confirm, are you also toggling the Japan region for searches?
I didn’t notice that was a thing, but it defaulted to Japan so we’re safe there.
Duck duck go needs a lot of work to replace Google search.
I’ve used it for years but often I still get the shits and just bring Google up after duck duck go fails to find what I’m looking for.
Huh I’m also a regular DDG user but I never have that experience.
For 9 of 10 search DDG give me what I’m looking for in the top results, for the other time I just add g! to the search and its sends me to google.
For me the direct opposite is true. About two years ago Google stopped giving me any accurate results, feeding me a bunch of semi-related garbage instead. DuckDuckGo feels like the Google of old: results that actually (literally) contain the terms of the query and not much else. I’d hate using the internet without it.
I felt the same way. Lately, though, ddg has been serving unrelated garbage ads in the middle of my searches. I am now looking for something new. Startpage has some decent results so far…
Yeah, have had a similar experience. I find the more specific or niche a question is, the better google is at finding relevant pages. DDG is perfectly fine the rest of the time, though, so I keep it as the default.
I usually forget I’m using it. Exception is for work - I frequently have to specify
g!to get Stackoverflow results to show up at the top.The android app is nice, especially the app tracking blocker. It takes up the VPN connection tho
Wow, USB-C and DDG in the same year? Look at Apple trying to stay relevant 😉
I really really don’t think Apple needs to do much to stay relevant.
USB-C wasn’t exactly Apple’s idea.
and they only did it because the EU forced them to
On Safari (iOS), Apple makes it easy to switch. Settings > Safari > Search Engine and select which one you want. I’ve been using DDG not quite a year and at first the change felt a lil jarring, but knowing I’m contributing less to Google’s ad revenue and their long list of privacy violations, I’m comfortable now sticking with DDG. Change isn’t always easy, convenient, or comfortable, but it can be done with just the tiniest bit of effort.
All browsers make it easy. In fact, Chrome on Android is quicker.
Settings > Search Engine > and select which one you want.
Currently you can pick between;
- Yahoo
- Bing
- DuckDuckGo
- Ecosia
That’s not the point at all.
The point is MOST users don’t change it or even know how. I seriously doubt anyone in my family would even know that it is possible, know that there are other search engines, or that Google knowing everything about their searches is not a good thing. And yes they all use Facebook too.🤦♂️
I think the tech community should come to the realization that most people (no, not in your immediate circle which is mostly tech) don’t want choice; they want ease of use, which means guidance.
Why would a person, who can’t differentiate between google, a web browser, an app, or even the internet, want to change their device settings on their own which requires 10 clicks when their experience can be configured by zero clicks by a mega corp? This is a systemic issue in our society and needs to be corrected at school level in some sort of “Social media awareness/IT class”.
I agree completely. The biggest issue is it requires critical thinking which is unfortunately not a common skill. Maybe this is one of the first things that needs correcting.
I would imagine you can add your own in as well, the same as Firefox allows.
Yeah, it’s easy. I recently changed to Kagi. Just had to do a search using Kagi first, then open settings and it was there.
That’s a bit more difficult. It doesn’t allow you to manually type in the address so you need to keep visiting it until Google recognizes that it’s a search engine.
this is a very poor argument. every browser I’ve used, even Chrome, makes it easy to change the default search engine in the settings.
Were they making an argument?
I wasn’t making any argument, merely offering advice how to change something and my experience in doing so. But my comment clearly upset a lot of Chrome users because I mentioned Google not respecting your privacy, which is a given for a lot of companies.
As I understood it, they were implying that Apple’s default is Google but they still care about privacy because they make it easy to switch to Duckduckgo.
I pointed out that this has been an essential feature in web browsers for years.
I wouldn’t agree with that being the correct interpretation, just so you know.
Did DDG move away from consolidating results from Google and other engines?
Bing now
I mean, it makes sense, DDG already use apple maps for their maps platform.
Duck duck go is crap these days, probably since it uses Bing. All I ever get are “7 best ways to…” click bait, probably AI generated “articles”.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Apple (AAPL.O) held talks with DuckDuckGo to replace Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google as the default search engine for the private mode on Apple’s Safari browser, the Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the discussions.
The details of the talks are expected to be released later this week, according to the report, after Judge Amit Mehta, overseeing a federal antitrust suit against Google, ruled on Wednesday that he would unseal the testimony of DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg and Apple executive John Giannandrea.
Apple, DuckDuckGo and Google did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice in a landmark U.S. trial argued Google, which has some 90% of the search market, illegally paid $10 billion annually to smartphone makers such as Apple and wireless carriers like AT&T (T.N) and others to be the default in search on their devices in order to stay on top.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella testified on Monday, saying that tech giants were competing for vast troves of content needed to train artificial intelligence, and complained Google was locking up content with expensive and exclusive deals with publishers.
He added that Microsoft had sought to make its Bing search engine the default on Apple smartphones but was rebuffed.
The original article contains 241 words, the summary contains 214 words. Saved 11%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Surprised they dont buy kagi tbh
What’s a kagi
It’s a search engine with better results than google https://kagi.com
But it’s not free. Pretty important point for a lot of people.
Yeah funny no one is mentioning the cost. It’s wildly expensive.
What would you say a good price is ?
The lowest tier should be about $20/yr. I’d pay that. The family unlimited $60/yr. I’d pay that for my wife and kids to have it too.
How’s it better than Google? Google is the king of data, idk how this competes with that
Google monetizes the search experience. It’s gotten steadily worse at its primary function for the last 15 years. Eventually, a better search engine will exist, it just takes time for Google to enshittify theirs enough.
Meh, I use adblocker and ghostery. The impact on my results is minimal if anything
K
They should make a deal with Kagi if they had any brains.
Even though im not sure if Kagi could take that amount of traffic right away.
They should make a deal with Kagi if they had any brains.
Oh, okay
Lists critical reason why using Kagi would actually be a really dumb move
lol
