So, Google is clearly paying lots of money directly to maintain their lead in the search engine market.
Bad look for Apple as well. They say they take privacy seriously, but are selling their user’s data to Google, one of the last companies you would want getting your information if you were concerned about privacy.
Selling their user data to Google? They’re putting Google as the default search engine, but users are free to change it. I don’t understand how that’s the same. People would probably set it to Google anyway these days, which is a shame because Kagi is the best search engine.
Apple does make a big deal about having sensible and secure defaults. This is the issue
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They are receiving billions so that their users use Google search - why is this a question?
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No. That would be if they set up Apple Search and sent some or all of the resulting data to Google.
This is much worse. They don’t have to do any work, and so they have no control over what data their devices give Google.
I’d prefer something more secure but all of them just suck. I use DDG but more than half the time I end up needing to use !g to get the google results because DDG just isn’t that good.
I really wonder how people making such claims use it. I’m a dev and have to search daily and constantly and hardly ever don’t I find something and when I don’t, the Google bang doesn’t help either.
But maybe DDG just works well for technical stuff.?
If I’m searching for something very specific, I’m generally searching a site I already know will have the answer. So if I’m looking for how to do something with code or devops tools, I to limit my search to stackoverflow or another forum first, or the respective sites for their documentation.
For all of that, DDG works perfectly. And that’s what I use it for most of the time. I will use it to search within sites a ton. Like if I want to get information about a person, event, whatever, I’ll search Wikipedia first and dive through the article and sources there.
Where it tends to fail, and it could be my own fault, is just general searches where I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for. Google is better at interpreting what I’m searching for and returning relevant results. DDG is like “here’s your results retard, search better next time”.
DDG is also a for profit venture and uses privacy more as a marketing ploy. They’ve been caught allowing Microsoft trackers.
That was their browser though and you shouldn’t use a Chromium based browser anyway if you value privacy (and the future of the web for that matter).
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Yeah, you have to be wary of whatever online service you use. I don’t really trust DDG but I trust the alternatives less.
Ive been using bing and bing copilot more and more for general stuff these last few months. Google needs to up their game. Other than that I use ddg as my first point of call
DDG largely uses the Bing API anyway so there’s no reason to use Bing itself over DDG. Bing is as bad or worse than Google for privacy.
I’m going to keep using DDG just out of principle and hope that their own crawler continues to get up to speed. They’ve definitely gotten better over the years but still leave a lot to be desired for search.
because Kagi is the best search engine
Fucking lol.
?
Just arbitrarily mentioning kagi is the best when there are tons of better options.
Are there any other options for paid ad-free search engines besides Brave Search?
I like Kagi, a lot, I’ve used it since I first heard about it months ago. But I worry how willing people will be to pay for search. I hope it continues to improve long term because it’s a great service. I don’t plan to use anything else.
The pricing is just… challenging. I’m not going to pay $20 per month for my family to switch search engines.
I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.
But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.
Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?
I’m not balking at the idea of paying, I’m balking at the specific pricing. I understand that Google makes more than that but Kagi’s goal can’t be to be one of the most profitable companies on the planet.
Honestly I would love if they did something like per-search pricing where you can set a monthly limit rather than paying for either 300 searches or unlimited.
They sell not data, but users, like a youtuber of mil. subscribers sells their userbase to Black Surfshark Online. Exclusive, if limited, access, exposure. If Apple happened to pick anything else as a default search engine, the majority wouldn’t even mind. And they could’ve done even worse if they put unique ID to every search queue like Edge, Yandex do.
Fuck Google and fuck Kagi.
I use DuckDuck Go.
DDG is bing, and it’s not very great. The only way to not be a product is to pay for the product you use, otherwise the money has to come from somewhere.
What did Kagi do to you?
They say they take privacy seriously, but are selling their user’s data to Google
Only idiots think Apple is privacy friendly lol.
I don’t link to news sites, but if you look up Apple Let Contractors Listen To Private Voice Recordings you’ll see that in 2019 they were sending voice clips to contractors.
Apple has everyone fooled. They act like they are so privacy focused because they do processing locally on your device instead of in the cloud, which means nothing. Google also has been moving a vast majority of things to local processing on their Pixel devices for years now. Is Google now privacy focused?
Only idiots think Apple is privacy friendly lol.
Apple has everyone fooled.
Apple are privacy-focused insofar as they will privately sell your data, sneakily.
They had a big billboard in LA that said “Apple knows privacy” or some shit.
I guarantee all of them ate that up without a second thought.
Aren’t almost all (at least photo editing ones) new Pixel 8 & Pixel 8 Pro features in the cloud? What things do you mean when you say Google is moving to local processing?
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Yeah, correcting those types of typos on mobile is a pain in the ass, haha.
IOS is closed source and doesn’t allow side loading, it shouldn’t be considered in privacy discussions
Why not? Isn’t apple able to push whatever they want to user’s phones without their permission, like they were paid to do with the U2 album?
I mean that it can’t be considered secure or privacy focused
My guy, there are plenty worse companies than Google to have your data. Let’s not get too hyperbolic.
It could always be worse. But that’s a bad excuse.
No, you’re right. That’s not a good excuse but being overly dramatic over it doesn’t really do anything productive either. At the end of the day it’s just a default option that can easily be changed. Not really a conspiracy by Google and Apple to steal your personal data.
The issue with Google is the scale of the data they can collect and their ability to use that data. Between Chrome, Search, Android, Waymo, Google Fi, etc they have a lot of ways to gather and use data on users.
And Google VPN.
Google’s entire recent business direction seems to be “protect your data from everyone else so our copy of your data is worth more”.
Also add Google Maps and Gmail to the list.
their users’* data
Nah, there’s only one Apple user, she just posts a lot online under pseudonyms and buys a continuous stream of products.
selling their user’s data to Google
Oh no my gmail address already sold. My mailbox, my searches :'(
Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.
I mean, 30% is what Apple charges for regular apps and all in-app purchases/subscriptions too.
It’s also a pretty standard margin for most retail stores as well. 30-40% at that scale isn’t surprising at all.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the DOJ—which has made the Google-Apple deal the center of its case alleging that Google maintains an illegal monopoly over search—this detail confirms how valuable default placements on iPhones are to the search leader.
Previously, sources told The New York Times that Google paid Apple approximately $18 billion in 2021 for the deal, but the exact amount of revenue sharing remained unknown until Monday.
The DOJ’s trial also recently revealed that Google paid $26 billion in total for default contracts, which are ostensibly responsible for driving up its search advertising revenue that is right now rapidly climbing.
In total, across all those default deals, Digital Content Next CEO Jason Kint estimated in a post on X that it’s possible that Google derives “at least $90 billion of its current annual revenue.”
"We’re continuing to focus on making AI more helpful for everyone; there’s exciting progress and lots more to come,” Pichai said in a statement reported by Search Engine Land.
Judge Amit Mehta, presiding over the antitrust trial, has said that the Google-Apple default deal is the “heart” of the DOJ’s case against Google.
The original article contains 716 words, the summary contains 184 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
