Apple Thinks Bing is Pretty Bad (theverge.com) 86
U.S. Judge Amit Mehta released a 286-page ruling Monday in the Google search antitrust case, revealing key details of the tech giant's business practices. The document is packed with factual findings and legal conclusions and some amazing comments. Here's one, for instance: Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine in Safari. But according to Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, there's no other meaningful alternative. During the trial, he said that "there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer" to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. "I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us," Cue said at another point. "They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company."
For Google, this is a sign that they've earned their default status (which, incidentally, they pay Apple gobs of money to maintain). Judge Mehta says that this is an indication that the "market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE [general search engine]." (Of course, Cue's opinion doesn't mean Bing is objectively bad. Elsewhere, the opinion notes that Bing's search quality is comparable to Google's on desktop, though it falls behind on mobile.)
For Google, this is a sign that they've earned their default status (which, incidentally, they pay Apple gobs of money to maintain). Judge Mehta says that this is an indication that the "market reality is that Google is the only real choice as the default GSE [general search engine]." (Of course, Cue's opinion doesn't mean Bing is objectively bad. Elsewhere, the opinion notes that Bing's search quality is comparable to Google's on desktop, though it falls behind on mobile.)
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Re: heh (Score:2)
Oh! You gave her a carburetor [bingcarburetor.com]!
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you know this is a search engine we are talking about, right?
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I don't think that's how one would break up Google.
Were I to break them up I'd split their cloud, advertising, and internet service (Gmail, search, apps for business, etc.) parts (and let them attach their moonshot stuff to whichever they think can best subsidize it).
Their ad supported stuff would then have incentive to use whatever gives them the best and performance for annoyance ratio, which may or may not be the company that gets split out.
Their cloud infrastructure would have to compete with the others
Re: UUUUUGHGGHGH (Score:2)
The search results have become worse the last decade due to all the search engine optimizations.
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You mean when the cost of phones plummeted and then the cost of phone service?
With the US telecommunications situation being so bad right now it may be hard to remember, but back in the day after that break up the US had some of the most affordable telecommunications in the world.
In the mid 90s we had free local calling and I could call the UK for $0.12/minute. Far far less than the reverse.
Just because the government hasn't actually cared about regional Monopoly on broadband, overly consolidated cellular,
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We got 2 decades of dividends from the result.
They shouldn't have been allowed to recombine, but splitting AT&T was hugely successful.
The evidence being how the US had some of the least expensive telecommunications for over a decade following, and for a while was very much ahead in cellular.
You can use that today (Score:2)
NATIONALIZE IT
Bing is already at the quality level a nationalized search engine would get you. :-)
Re: You can use that today (Score:3)
I honestly don't think a nationalized one would even be that good. Europe tried this once in a collaboration between a few EU governments. They called it quaero. They were working on it for something like 6 years and ultimately abandoned it.
Re: UUUUUGHGGHGH (Score:3)
I really don't believe a search engine would be the kind of thing you'd want to nationalize; the quality would certainly turn to crap very quickly. I don't know if you recall searchking, but basically that company was asking for it to be nationalized as a utility because google was downranking the spammy junk he was peddling. If google was a government entity, him, and basically anybody else, would essentially have some kind of a right to it.
Or worse, the government would just pick some entity to manage it
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Sure, the private sector could always come up with another one that ends up outcompeting it until basically nobody uses it anymore, in which case why did the government spend untold hundreds of billions of dollars buying it out to begin with?
Well, obviously, because "capitalism bad, something something", of course!
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Search and indexing isn't really infrastructure. But taking a multinational company's product down to a single nation's level is going to be a downgrade even ignoring the inefficiencies of government.
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god just once can we PLEASE do the thing that makes sense with an infrastructural monopoly and FUCKING NATIONALIZE IT instead of pissing around with this pretend "breaking it up" bullshit that just makes regional monopolies in industries where no regions should exist
Oh yeah.. Because when I think of efficient & well-run organizations, the first thought that comes to me is the assholes with the $35 trillion debt.
People like you should be prohibited from breeding.
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Following in this in the early days when there were 30 plus search engines there used to be apps that would searc
That doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
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"only real choice"; and people wonder why the general public have a low opinion of corporate law...
Bing (or its anonymized variant DDG) takes all of a minute to set up on Firefox for Android.
The battle was fought and lost but Microsoft should bring back Windows 11 Phone edition just for the LOLs. Not to gain market share above 1% but to troll governments whenever antitrust is concerned.
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Even a year ago, I found bing inadequate when I'd try it--usually when google was throwing some kind of a tantrum. Every few searches, it wouldn't come up with google's top (and correct) result.
Maybe a month or so ago, fed up with more google weirdness (falsely claiming suspicious requests and demanding that I help train its AI pattern recognition before proceeding [likely because of the number of its trackers I have blocked, I suppose]), I got annoyed enough to make duckduck my default search engine, and
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Bing (or its anonymized variant DDG)
... I found bing inadequate when I'd try it --usually when google was throwing some kind of a tantrum... I got annoyed enough to make duckduck my default search engine
It sounds like you struggled a lot with google, but really really really wanted it to be better, but ended up switching to bing-wrapper?
You could have just agreed with him.
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no, it *was*, objectively, better.
A year ago, bing still often failed to find what I was looking for, while it was in the top few google hits.
That has become much rarer.
I'd tried switching a couple of times in the past, but always gave up after a couple of days, as I' have to go to google. This time, it's been almost a month,
Re:That doesn't matter (Score:4, Insightful)
Who cares about what Apple thinks about Bing? Because Google thinks there is an alternative search engine, otherwise they wouldn't pay 20Billion out of their pocket. What is really going on is Apple not wanting to miss out on 20B so they want to placate the DOJ to keep the status quo, they'll tell them anything at this point to keep milking that cash cow. 20B for typing in google.com to their browser code.
However much you hate the guts out of Apple they are still one of the most valuable companies on earth and they got there because they have good business sense. So their opinion of the search engine market and assessment of the various players in it is interesting, if only because Apple does not have a dog in that fight and therefore should be pretty brutally honest in their assessment of the various search engines.
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Dude.... they have a 20 billion dollar dog in this fight... they really, really, really want to keep collecting that sweet Google money.
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Dude.... they have a 20 billion dollar dog in this fight... they really, really, really want to keep collecting that sweet Google money.
Apple's annual revenue is around 400 billion dollars. USD 20 billion may sound like a lot of money to you and it isn't exactly chump change but losing it isn't even going to come close to bankrupting them. If anybody is concerned here it's Google about a good chuck of the currently 2.2 billion Apple device users switching to a new search engine after an iOS/iPadOS/MacOS update so I suppose it is a relief for Google to find out what Apple thinks of their competition.
Re:That doesn't matter (Score:4, Informative)
A single line item that is worth 5% of your annual revenue is going to take some explanations to the board if you lose it no matter how big you are.
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A single line item that is worth 5% of your annual revenue is going to take some explanations to the board if you lose it no matter how big you are.
That's assuming Google will never have a viable search competitor and with what's happening in AI it's increasingly looking like Google will get some serious competitors. When Google does get viable competition expect the price for being the default search tool on 2.2 billion Apple devices to increase quite a bit from the measly 20 billion Google pays to day. That should make Apple's board very, very, very happy. Like I said, unless Apple starts competing on the internet search market, Apple does not have a
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that 5% though is pure profit. And the 400B is revenue not profit. Slicing 20B off your profit hurts. Apple runs around 100B net profit, so that 20B is 20% of their profit.
That 20 billion is not going anywhere. In fact Apple is selling itself chap for a mere 20 billion. Google needs Apple to keep Google as the default search engine to maintain Google's search monopoly. If Apple decides to end this relationship with Google you can bet your bottom dollar that whichever search engine replaces Google as the default on 2.2 billion Apple devices will be paying more than 20 billion for the privilege. Apple has a lot more leverage in this relationship than Google which now has all ki
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However much you hate the guts out of Apple they are still one of the most valuable companies on earth and they got there because they have good business sense.
I guess that entirely depends on how you value things. Apparently, your values consist of, at a minimum, business sense. Apple would be considered "valuable" in that regard; however, I suspect other companies are much more valuable overall. Apple makes cute tech toys. Cute tech toys are not intrinsically valuable, especially when the infrastructure that supports them fails. A business that manufactures quality tools for directly manipulating the environment without supporting infrastructure are all more val
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However much you hate the guts out of Apple they are still one of the most valuable companies on earth and they got there because they have good business sense.
I guess that entirely depends on how you value things...
No, Apple's value is what the market says it is in Dollars and Cents, your philosophising does not interest me.
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No, Apple's value is what the market says it is in Dollars and Cents, your philosophising does not interest me.
I understand and respect your position. I do not think you understand or respect my position.
Your dollar's value is suspect. The way success is measured is suspect. Go ahead and try to convince me that Twitter was worth 44 billion dollars. That 44 billion dollars can buy a LOT of farmland, which could be infinitely more valuable than some stupid and redundant communication service.
Feel free to assume I am only thinking theoretically here. You won't starve, so none of this matters to you.
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Because Google thinks there is an alternative search engine, otherwise they wouldn't pay 20Billion out of their pocket.
That's not what Google thinks. Google — and everyone else — knows perfectly well that none of the alternative search engines are competitive. Google pays Apple to prevent Apple from building its own search engine.
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That's my question. What's different between maps vs search that Apple decided to roll their own maps (at initial great inconvenience to users) but not search?
And providing search - that is, being the gatekeeper to the web - is certainly a desirable position to be in.
This seems to indicate that search is a natural monopoly, although I can't see why that would be.
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Search requires a lot more resources and capital - both on the indexing side and the huge metrics crunching side for ranking. For maps, you can license map data and still be seen as the provider.
Maps requires a lot more location data. So either because they want the appearance of being privacy focused or also because they want you to constantly hand over location data.
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> What's different between maps vs search that Apple
> decided to roll their own maps (at initial great
> inconvenience to users) but not search?
The difference is that Google didn't intentionally cripple search and withhold features from Apple users in order to prop up Android. That's what they did with Google Maps. Most specifically and egregiously, they withheld turn-by-turn navigation from the version of Google Maps for Apple devices when they rolled it out on Android. So, after having been sta
Re: That doesn't matter (Score:3)
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I've built a private tile server before for a government app. As long as you have a source of location data it's not that hard to build a nice map with routing and what not. It's more bandwidth intensive than search, sure, but all the tools are pretty standardized and there is a lot of open info on how to do it out there.
I would not even know how to start building a competitor to Google's search capabilities. I think it's just a way more complicated problem and it is hard to compete with the huge corpus t
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What's different between maps vs search that Apple decided to roll their own maps (at initial great inconvenience to users) but not search?
The nature of the market and cost. Given the numbers disclosed in this case and knowledge of the cost of mapping products, there is somewhere between one and two orders of magnitude difference in cost between map product and indexing the entire Internet in near real time.
In the mapping business much of the data is public and can be had by anyone. There are competitive aggregators of data in various forms. HERE Technologies is used by Garmin and Microsoft, for example. Both Microsoft and Apple have als
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Google pays Apple to prevent Apple from building its own search engine.
Now THIS would be an abuse of monopoly position. I use Google search and nothing else, but they're really going out of bounds paying off companies not to compete.
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but they're really going out of bounds paying off companies not to compete.
Sure. I'm not arguing what Google does isn't monopolistic. Only the much finer point that there are no competitive alternatives unless Apple, with its vast resources in capital and talent, makes one, and Google doesn't want that. If some court wants to bust all that up and can actually make it stick — despite the fact that The Powers That Be are enthralled with big tech money — great. Don't hold your breath.
Apple prefers this arrangement as well: they get a bunch of Google bux and they don
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The only thing that needs broken up is the payments scheme, in my opinion.
It's likely that they remain the default search. The only reason there was a chance of them being removed before was as a negotiation tactic. Once that's off the table they'll be the guaranteed default for quite a while.
If Apple wants to build their own, it gives another choice. It doesn't take away Google.
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> Google pays Apple to prevent Apple from building its own search engine.
Is that contractually what's been agreed? If so, then yeah, this is awful.
However, if someone was paying me $20bn *not* to do something, you can bet I'd spend a bit of that money doing R&D on that thing so that I _could_ do it quickly at any time in the future if I wanted. If Apple isn't contractually bound NOT to do it, they'd be absolute muppets for not having some sort of solution in the works that they can trot out in the ne
Competition with Negative Prices (Score:2)
Re:That doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
Because Google thinks there is an alternative search engine, otherwise they wouldn't pay 20Billion out of their pocket
Google pays $20 billion so Apple doesn't create the alternative.
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so Apple doesn't create the alternative.
Like Apple Maps. It's great, but nobody can find it.
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I don't care what Apple thinks, but they're 100% right.
There is an alternate search engine, it's DuckDuckGo. Bing is an obnoxious mess.
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DuckDuckGo is basically just Bing.
Specialization for the win... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's how it started anyway. Originally Google was search, and search alone, and they focused on making search the best they could.
Microsoft is what? An OS company? And an office suite company? And a hardware company? A database company? A gaming company? A tablet or game console or phone company? An IDE company? And a cloud company? And a github owner? And ...
They never had to specialize on anything so they didn't get really good at anything except for buying other companies that did specialize and delivered something good, only to undermine the good thing they bought to make it their own.
Re:Specialization for the win... (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, like all modern software companies, became a data broker company. It is what Google is, what Facebook is, what Netflix is... Probably the only big company that isn't a data broker is Apple, and that's because they keep the data to themselves.
Everything everyone does nowadays is with the explicit or implicit goal of collecting data, and it's why everything is going to shit. None of the big players specialize in doing anything well, they just specialize in collecting data by doing the bare minimum. Shitty OS, shitty search, shitty content and shitty algorithms. As long as they get the precious data, they're technically doing a good job.
All that was, of course, BEFORE the AI boom. Imagine where we're gonna go, now.
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Google also keeps the data to themselves. They don't share or sell it. What they sell is ads. They'll show your ads to users for a price. They'll display ads on your website for a price. But they keep that data to themselves and use it to determine how
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I'd be curious to know the size of the Bing Search team versus the Google Search team.
Of course it is ridiculous to say they don't specialize. Their department is hyper specialized in it. The real question is how big is the department and how much corporate meddling are they dealing with.
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Microsoft is what? An OS company? And an office suite company? And a hardware company? A database company? A gaming company? A tablet or game console or phone company? An IDE company? And a cloud company? And a github owner?
Microsoft is a money making machine. The same as the major American auto manufactures, Boeing, and frankly, any major business within America. It isn't about the products, it is about the money. That is why Sculley, previously CEO of Pepsico, was placed in charge of Apple. Apple literally failed as a money printing machine until Steve Jobs went back and started making 'cool shit'. The current Apple is back to being a money making machine. There is no more 'cool shit' coming out of Apple. It is atrophied lik
"You eat pieces of shit for breakfast?!" (Score:5, Funny)
Well one person does... (Score:1)
Just to sort of stick it to Google a bit in what tiny way I can, I have long set Bing to be my default search engine on my phone...
Apple is right about Bing. Just because I am willing to suffer like this, does not mean every phone user should.
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Well, I googled a few things on Bing back in the day to see what all the fuss was about. But it was resoundingly sub-par. So I went back to googling on Google.
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BingDuckDuckGo (Score:4, Insightful)
As a frequent DDG user, I appreciate the privacy aspect, but often find the result quality lacking and kneel to Google when I have to.
DDG gets its results from Bing, and from what I understand, the privacy play isn't pure when it comes to Microsoft.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news... [tomsguide.com]
I'd sure like DDG to recognize and support all the Google search operators (like "-", f.e.)
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As a frequent DDG user, I appreciate the privacy aspect, but often find the result quality lacking and kneel to Google when I have to.
https://www.startpage.com/ [startpage.com]
Ostensibly better privacy than DDG, and it uses Google's results.
Enjoy!
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That used to be the case for me too.. 5 years ago!!! Since then every time I have tried Google the results were just as lacking they were in DDG when they made me try Google.
Shoots self in foot (Score:4, Informative)
Google pays Apple billions of dollars a year to be the default search engine in Safari. But according to Eddy Cue, Apple's senior vice president of services, there's no other meaningful alternative.
So, in other words, Apple would use Google even if it was free. Well, there goes a few billion a year.
BTW, I use DDG for general term searches and Yandex for images. Yandex blows Google right out of the water. DDG might be on its way out at my house. Not because of search results. But due to that gob of crusty JavaScript I've got to run for the privilege of submitting a simple query string to the search server.
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>So, in other words, Apple would use Google even if it was free.
no, that doesn't really follow.
Apple would *not* use the others, even if google was free, true.
But it would likely make its own.
And an apple version would likely factor in, "no sane person would watch this video unless his child's life depended upon it", effectively de-monetizing 99.9% of utube content . . .
yah right (Score:1)
Missed opportunity (Score:2)
During the trial, [Eddy Cue] said that "there's no price that Microsoft could ever offer" to Apple to get the company to preload Bing in Safari. "I don't believe there's a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us," Cue said at another point. "They offered to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company."
Should have ended his testimony with ... "I mean, seriously, Bing is not Google." :-)
Yeah nah (Score:2)
That's called being facetious. Apple definitely has a price, every company does. And it's far lower than "they could give us the whole company".
Here's a hint: If you turn down Microsoft giving you their company, your CEO and entire board are fired. Don't pretend your shareholders won't rip your balls off.
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They can accept Microsoft giving them the whole company but still not use their search. Once the company is theirs, they have no agreement with anyone anymore except themselves so they could terminate it then.
BingDuckDuckGo (Score:2, Informative)
As a frequent DDG user, I appreciate the privacy aspect, but often find the result quality lacking and kneel to Google when I have to.
DDG gets its results from Bing, and from what I understand, the privacy play isn't pure when it comes to Microsoft.
https://www.tomsguide.com/news... [tomsguide.com]
I'd sure like DDG to recognize and support all the Google search operators (like "-", f.e.)
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DuckDuckGo is just Bing with location-based ad search results injected at the bottom.
They could potentially be better for privacy, but there is no way for the end user to confirm this.
Honestly (Score:4, Insightful)