> Apparently in 2020, Google conducted a study looking to see what would happen to its bottom line if it “were to significantly reduce the quality of its search product.” The conclusion was even if the company made search shittier, the revenues from Search would be fine.
Just because they could, doesn't mean they should. But I guess they decided to anyway - it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results.
> it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results.
This has been a 20 year process with no single step-change. Ads used to be on he right side in colored boxes. Gradually, they started to appear above results and with no background color.
I recall that someone made a compilation image showing the gradual progression from an obviously offset box (with a different design and solid colored background) to a design that's virtually identical to a search result other than the "Sponsored" label. Of course, I can't find it because search engines are garbage now.
Having to search through more pages to find what you want = more time spent on search = more ad revenue. The word "google" has become so synonymous with searching the web that any competition among non-technical users is near impossible.
Google directly benefits from making their search results worse.
Everyone knows what "ChatGPT" is, and its becoming to AI what "Google" is to search.
Speaking of Gemini, I can't really remember the last time Google launched a successful product. Why bother using and depending on it when you know it will be replaced by another product within a year.
Those same non-technical users will call anything "google" as long as they can type in a box and get some answers. They'll just as well google things on the blue google, or the orange google with the funny mascot, just like I'll hoover my floor with a Dyson.
To be clear, the post you linked does not argue that 'fiduciary duty' ISN'T about shareholder value maximization; rather, that maximizing shareholder value goes beyond short-term thinking
> State codes (including that of Delaware, the preeminent state for corporate law) similarly allow corporations to be formed for "any lawful business or purpose,” and the corporate charters of big public firms typically also define company purpose in these broad terms. And corporate case law describes directors as fiduciaries who owe duties not only to shareholders but also to the corporate entity itself, and instructs directors to use their powers in “the best interests of the company.”
> Serving shareholders’ “best interests” is not the same thing as either maximizing profits, or maximizing shareholder value.
[..]
> More to the point, corporate directors are protected from most interference when it comes to running their business by a doctrine known as the business judgment rule. It says, in brief, that so long as a board of directors is not tainted by personal conflicts of interest and makes a reasonable effort to stay informed, courts will not second-guess the board’s decisions about what is best for the company — even when those decisions predictably reduce profits or share price.
“Contrary to what many believe, U.S. corporate law does not impose any enforceable legal duty on corporate directors or executives of public corporations to maximize profits or share price.”
Google is a special case where most of the shares sold to the public have no voting rights.
The founders and early investors got the shares with voting rights, plus non voting shares they could sell to cash in, while retaining their control of the company.
> A Summary of Alphabet's Class Structures
Class A: Held by a regular investor with regular voting rights (GOOGL)
Class B: Held by the founders, with 10 times the voting power of Class A shares
Class C: No voting rights, typically held by employees and some Class A stockholders (GOOG)
> While it is certainly true that a central objective of for-profit corporations is to make money, modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not do so. For-profit corporations, with ownership approval, support a wide variety of charitable causes, and it is not at all uncommon for such corporations to further humanitarian and other altruistic objectives. Many examples come readily to mind. So long as its owners agree, a for-profit corporation may take costly pollution-control and energy-conservation measures that go beyond what the law requires. A for-profit corporation that operates facilities in other countries may exceed the requirements of local law regarding working conditions and benefits. If for-profit corporations may pursue such worthy objectives, there is no apparent reason why they may not further religious objectives as well.
If Apple could produce a high quality, privacy-minded search that respected common query operators, I'd jump for it. Unfortunately without robust ads, there's no money in it.
Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google. Now that Bing belongs to the ad division, it's no better than Google search. Both platforms are defacto promoted ad engines with SEO gaming for results just beyond the ads.
And I'm aware of Kagi, but it's not for the wide swaths of whatever can be indexed out there... it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s.
I paid for Kagi and used it for 3 months because the only way you could evaluate search is through “vibes”.
I’m glad it benefits others but for me it was not much different from Google (with ad block).
In two ways it was an inconvenience compared to Google — location search (Kagi respects privacy so it doesn’t do location, and its default maps are not as good — though google maps are one click away, it was an extra click each time.) searching for where to watch movies on streaming platforms was also missing so I had to do !g.
I wish Kagi well — it’s by no means bad, in fact it’s an admirable product. But it wasn’t for me.
In my experience, if I want location results I just go directly to maps.google.com or the map app on my phone. Kagi was great because when I google "tacos" I usually just want recipes (or the wikipedia article), not the location of the taco bell down the street.
Personally, I find it impossible to stomach continuing with ad-based models. I want zero ads in my life. Also, with newer AI the old search model is done for. Search will shift, should shift, to AI agents doing the search along with reading through various pages before giving accurate summaries with links. In that model users won't be exposed to ads as many searches won't even require them going to the end pages.
Thus, there needs to be new models for how things work, both for end websites but also for search, models not based on ads.
But I couldn't disagree more about search. AI search is a lot like asking your friend. Your friend who relies on their memory and refuses to look things up online. Searching with AI requires too much brain power because you have to verify everything it gives you.
Of course, that's becoming the case with ads embedded in the search results, too. Kinda bleak, really.
The new generation of AI search will likely use traditional indexes or RAG followed by the AI reading the results to do higher level filtering. If you look at how search gpt, kagi experts, or the hugging face llm search works I think that will be the direction.
Possibly even personalized agents could do this locally. You'll have to verify exactly as much as you do currently with old-style search, but ideally with much higher quality results and ranking, and no ads. For simpler things likely the answer will be directly trust worthy.
Personally, I just don't trust anyone to summarize content for me. Call it my own weird quirks and biases, but I'm maybe 50/50 on conforming to populist sentiment, and if it's a story I even mildly care about I don't want to take that coin flip. I'll just take the time to at least skim the article, then read the abstract of any acedemic sources it points to.
The AI agent will subtly serve you ads. OpenAI calls it “publishing partnerships”:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40310228 “Leaked deck reveals how OpenAI is pitching publisher partnerships” 303 points by rntn 88 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 281 comments
I would be surprised if paying for the AI agent would stop it from also taking money from advertisers, just like buying a copy of Microsoft Windows doesn’t stop meaningless ads showing in the start menu etc.
There’s plenty of money in it. Even if the ads were minimally personalized (ie use location so that when I search for a plumber I see local plumbers) just the keyword-based ads would probably be enough to cover the costs. Apple users are exactly who advertisers want to reach.
Apple has shown in the past that if something is considered a key technology, they would rather own it than hand that power to a key competitor. They made their own CPUs, they made Maps, and they could make search.
They can do it, but is it going to make them money? Google's $20b/year payment made up 20% of their income in 2023. 20% of their income was just free money, and their dev team doesn't have to do anything for them to get it.
Would Apple or their shareholders accept a minimum 20% loss in income, plus whatever the expenses would be to build a Search and Ad platform, plus the continued expenses of maintaining and updating it?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion for $60 billion worth of traffic. Apple said it would cost $6 billion per year to build and run a search engine. I don't think it would take much of an ad platform to pull in enough money to make it work for Apple and their shareholders.
It all comes down to whether or not Apple sees search as a key part of their phones and so far they haven't. FWIW, I think they're right - it's not a key part the same way Maps is, for example.
Still, 20% of their net income is guaranteed free money. I doubt there are minimal (if any) expenses on Apple's side to maintain the status quo of Google being the default search engine.
> it's tough to stomach paying for a utility that has been free since the 1990s.
No such thing as a free lunch. I'd rather pay to not have ads splashed in my face than have some corporation sell my data to the highest bidder.
And an open source search engine isn't exactly a feasible endeavor (e.g. one that can be produced in 5-10 years without some reliance on existing tech). But I'd happily donate if anyone wants to take a gander at such an initiative.
One way you might fund a search engine is if you needed the index for some other busineds purpose (say, Siri). It will have a cost, but if you can defray the crawling and some processing cost, it becomes much easier to stomach without ads.
I honestly think a crypto-micropayment solution (a la brave) would be overall a net positive. An easy way with send pennies or less with virtually no overhead fees.
It's shame though that crypto is to most people now, well, you know - crypto.
Let's be concrete here. What's a "privacy minded" search engine exactly?
Do you mean you don't want the search engine to correlate your query with what you clicked on? or any other feedback from user interactions to update its ranking?
Good luck with that.
Or do you want a free search engine without any ads ? You might as well wait for a company to send you money every week.
> Bing as of a handful of years ago wasn't all that bad -- in fact, if you lived in the Microsoft enterprise sphere, it was arguably better than Google.
That is probably not enough though. Products that are just a little better than something that is good enough usually fail. I'm reminded of all the analysises of why plan 9 failed.
network effects are strong. At a certain critical mass, only the company itself can detrhrone the company. Otherwise, people will mostly settle for the familiar over the true best.
I think that is stateing it too far in the other direction. If you have a killer app, you can definitely dethrone the current king. I think it just has to be something much more significant than just marginal improvements.
To be a bit more subtle: you can make a better competitor and be successful. But it's really hard to "dethrone the king" as you put it. Twitter is a great example of a social media actively destroying itself in ways that'd already put a medium sized business in the red, but its competiton as of now is far from a threat. Reddit as well, but there's not even a consensus best alternative there.
Subtle point #2, this is mostly for the general consumer. You can and will piss off professionals or businesses to a point where you shoot yourself in the foot Unity was the most recent high-profile example, and Adobe is slowly losing doting over its issues.
Steve Jobs famously said Microsoft's problem is that they have no taste in design. I had the displeasure of having to use a fresh install of Windows 11 the other day and Bing without an adblocker was a complete horror show, big carousels of products and obvious ads at the top of the results screen you have to scroll past to see results, irrelevant news articles shoved in your face, the signal to noise ratio of Bing's search results page is abysmal. If Bing just copied the way Google's homepage and search results looked like in 2008 they would immediately start taking marketshare from Google.
Reminds me of the "Microsoft Re-Designs the iPod Packaging" video[1] from nearly 2 decades ago (wow, I feel old). It was funny because all of Microsoft's brand looked exactly like that back in those days, and you could really picture them screwing the product marketing up that badly.
The best marketing move for Microsoft is to fire all their marketing people that touch Windows.
An Operating System should be a tool, not a marketing destination. Get rid of all the useless telemetry that caused you to colossally ruin Windows 8 by removing the start menu button that "nobody used" and then "how do I turn off my computer" became the most looked up search term that year.
Microsoft has great products, all ruined by marketing departments.
I used to work at a large telco, and had daily dealings with Marketing.
It was incredible to see how important they thought they were, and how every single aspect of the entire company had to be about Marketing. Even when it very clearly made the product shitter and pissed off customers and was a total disaster, they would increase the number of ads, increase the BS customers had to listen to when calling in and make the website a nightmare to navigate.
Even when external experts hired specifically to re-design the website for millions of dollars said point blank their decisions were horrific and were driving customers away, marketing said "We are Marketing, do as we say".
Everyday working with them made me think of that Steve Jobs video where he talks about a company being doomed when the marketing folks take over.
(Incidentally, the VP of Marketing is now the CEO, so yeah)
Devs are forced to do something by the manager to please the skip manager. Teams do things the hard way to make it look as if they're actually doing things. Organizations hide from leadership what users really like lest the org got disassembled because they were creating literal crap. And leadership went to marketing team to cover this all up from the investors. Traders would buy in these stocks just because these big companies have good marketing to pretend they were making the right decisions.
Most if not all big companies without tasteful people would eventually turn into monstrosities like this. Everyone were telling 'stories' around 'stories' that fold into a tangled web of everyone else, but sooner or later one day the bubble's going to pop, and down the stocks be gone.
People with bad tastes aren't the worst to deal with. They have taste, it's just that it's different from others'. Tasteless people will do anything in their power to keep the wheels turning, and that means to let tasteful people surrounding them surrender their tastes, so everyone can and will become tasteless people who would do anything to keep the wheels turning.
I've been happily off Google Search for several years now and have enjoyed Duck Duck Go (Bing) ever since. Recently, the lack of Reddit posts in search results is disappointing, but not the end of the world. Wish I could move off GMail, but it's a bigger task. I've also been on Firefox for over 10 years now and don't miss Chrome at all. Google does some good things, but they lost my trust a long time ago.
How is Googles CEO still there, I understand that changing CEO's does not magically change anything but this is getting ridiculous. Google has dramatically changed since he has been in charge, this might be the 4th crazy mind blowing incident that could possibly lead to their downfall but I have a bad memory.
Historically, Google has served as the fallback for pretty poor performance from Siri on knowledge tasks, which to this day often falls back to web search results.
But, if Bing (especially circa 2016) were that search provider, it would lead to confusion all the way down. It's bad enough not to receive an answer from your first attempt, but it's much worse not to be able to receive an answer at all.
The payments were certainly a sweetener to discourage exploring (or incubating) alternatives, but I agree with the article that I don't think they could have dumped or replaced Google at that time, even without the payments.
Given a broader shift from search engines to "knowledge engines" or however they're branded these days (which, in fairness, probably drew some inspiration from Google's Knowledge Graph), I think that Apple's options are wider these days.
Taking money out of the equation (or making the offer equal between Microsoft and Google), could Bing have improved to meet the quality of Google if it had all iOS users using it and providing usage data to improve the experience? How long would that take?
I would assume the answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is too long for Apple's liking.
With that logic, one only has to look at the decline of the quality of Google Search results and ask yourself, why does Apple continue to endorse such a low quality product?
The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet. I seem to recall so many commenters on HN whatabouting on the topic of advertising and privacy when it comes to iPhones versus android smartphones.
Is that line item the justification for people to imagine, whole cloth, that Apple has an advertising incentive, and therefore is no better than Google?
Wouldn't it be ironic for folks trying to equivocate Apple and Google's advertising agenda to find out that the only reason Apple has revenue from "advertising" is because Google pays them to?
> The big DOJ antitrust trial over Google Search revealed last week that Big G pays Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search on iOS. That’s over 20 percent of the “services” revenue Tim Cook loves to talk about on earnings calls, but hey, where is all that money on the balance sheet?
> BI’s Peter Kafka found out: Apple categorizes it as “advertising.”
> The $20 billion is categorized as "advertising" on Apple's Balance Sheet
No it isn't.
First, that's not what a balance sheet is. A balance sheet is the list of assets and liabilities. How those assets were gained isn't tracked. What you're thinking of is the income statement. Not understanding the difference is fine, but understanding the difference would have made it clear that your source is trash
Second, there is no "advertising" line item in Apple's financials. Not in the balance sheet (where it would make no sense) nor in the income statement (it is under services, but not broken out further).
The rest of your post is basically fanfic, since it is based on this invalid claim.
I was hoping for this very response (one that bothered to fact check apple's released statements):
yeah, balance sheet is the incorrect technical term.
And yes, obviously they haven't broken it out beyond "services" income on an income statement -- otherwise it would have been news prior to the court fact findings becoming public record.
> But each year, in Apple's annual report, when it breaks down each of its business lines, Apple does say: "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements."
> Apple does have a traditional advertising business...$5.4 billion last year.
That being said, what's fanfic about posing a question and proposing a hypothetical?
My primary point is that there are so many adtech apologists looking to drag Apple's claims of privacy, user-focused into the same realm as the ad-surveillance business: wouldn't it be deeply ironic if the vast majority of that "advertising" business (roughly 80% of it) was just payments from the biggest adtech giant of all?
Which is a conditional statement: IF(advertising=google money) -> ironic situation.
IF we can trust the business insider reporter's reading of income statements:
> "The Company's advertising services include third-party licensing arrangements." Like renting out its search exclusivity to Google.
Then it would be ironic indeed for people trying to paint them as no better than google. But my guess is that most people would just shrug and suggest that taking money for default search engine placement is the same as monetizing the entire web.
You weren't actually posing a hypothetical though, but presenting this line item as a fact (and then imagining how that'd invalidate a bunch of criticism of Apple, which is the part that seemed to go into fanfic).
Just because they could, doesn't mean they should. But I guess they decided to anyway - it was around that time that adverts shifted from being clearly labelled to being disguised as search results.