Samsung Considering Replacing Google With Bing as the Default Search Engine (nytimes.com) 57
Google is sprinting to protect its core business with a flurry of projects, including updates to its search engine and plans for an all-new one. From a report: Google's employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices. For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology. Google's reaction to the Samsung threat was "panic," according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.
A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. The new features, under the project name Magi, are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company's current service, attempting to anticipate users' needs.
A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times. The new features, under the project name Magi, are being created by designers, engineers and executives working in so-called sprint rooms to tweak and test the latest versions. The new search engine would offer users a far more personalized experience than the company's current service, attempting to anticipate users' needs.
Just telling Google they need a bigger payment (Score:3, Insightful)
As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:3)
who really gives a damn what goes in and out of the default search engine box?
Re:As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:5, Interesting)
The most infuriating part is google ignoring my keywords. I typed them for a reason, so the results will contain those words. Literally the first result will have one or two terms with a strike through line forcing me to wrap quotes around them. Sometimes that even fails with the results having mildly adjacent words. If you’re shopping for a part number you better triple check what google brings you otherwise you’ll be ordering wrong.
Now eBay on the other hand has fantastic and accurate results.
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Give me back circa 2000 Google, I could find anything with that.
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This always happens to nerds. We build this stuff to our liking, then it gets popular and is changed to suit the masses.
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Allow me to tell you a parable.
Back when I was young, and so was the internet, we created a beautiful garden here. It was marvelous. It was a sight to behold. Ok, fine, it wasn't. Compared to what you can see here today, it was ... well, very homely. Quaint, even. But hey, what do you expect, we were simple gardeners with very simple tools at our disposal, we grew our little private gardens and we when someone developed something neat, we gave a seedling to our neighbor, so they could enjoy it too.
And then
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ignoring my keywords
The problem is you're looking for keywords like it's 2001. Google transitioned away from that style of search a long time ago. Stop throwing keywords at it and ask it a question.
It is the most popular search engine with a user base that covers a very significant percentage of the human population. Try and act like a normal human and not a programmer. This product is not designed for *you*.
Re:As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:4, Insightful)
The "-site:" list I have and paste into every search query is already long enough that it almost exceeds the maximum search length...
Hey, Google, an idea: Let us store that as a default. You not only get us to log in, you also get a load of free information about us, mostly about what sites we don't give a fuck about.
Hint: Most of them belong to YOU.
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The most infuriating part is google ignoring my keywords. I typed them for a reason, so the results will contain those words. Literally the first result will have one or two terms with a strike through line forcing me to wrap quotes around them. Sometimes that even fails with the results having mildly adjacent words.
You might try putting "allintext:" before your keywords. Google doesn't adhere to it as strictly as they used to, but using it still eliminates a lot of the crap results that they generate in their quest to deliver quantity instead of quality.
I also frequently end up using "-" in front of keywords that I don't want in the results. Google is increasingly ignoring this modifier as well, but it's still somewhat useful.
Re:As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:5, Informative)
Google cares. They pay Apple alone between $10 to $15 billion each year just to remain the default search engine in Safari.
Apple cares, because they receive enormous payments each year just for doing almost nothing. Last year Apple generated $95 billion in profits. Can you imagine that more than 10% of their revenue was supplied by Google, for just setting a simple configuration flag in their browser software?
To put it in the context, each company on the Fortune 500 list made at least $6 billion in gross revenues last year. Apple regularly receives more than TWICE THE GROSS REVENUE of many Fortune 500 companies each and every year JUST FROM GOOGLE.
This really demonstrates what Google cares about. If Google had to compete in the marketplace based on the merits of their products, they would be in trouble.
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Well, I could have played a sad song for them on the world's smallest violin. If I could play it.
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>Apple cares, because they receive enormous payments each year just for doing almost nothing. Last year Apple generated $95 billion in profits. Can you imagine that more than 10% of their revenue was supplied by Google, for just setting a simple configuration flag in their browser software?
It'd be $10-15 billion of $395 billion (revenue), not profit. A big deal yet nowhere near 10% of revenue, more like 3.5%.
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No that revenue costs apple nothing to make, who many man hours do you think it takes to have the setting being google.com instead of bing.com, the biggest cost I can see will be to have the managers have a meeting to decide to do it. So yeah out of 10-15 billion they probably make 9-14 billion profit after they pay upper management.
Re: As long as I have the option to change it, (Score:3)
Fair points. Yeah, it does look to be a big chunk, even after tax. I read the 2022 filing and 10% isn't unrealistic.
Thanks for setting me straight on that.
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The search engine company cares. That's where most of them make their money. Since most users never bother to change the default, getting set as that drives a ton of traffic to the search engine which they then monetize with ads and/or collect user analytics which they then sell...also to help target ads.
Personally, I think this would be a good move. Google's search results have been getting mediocre while they've grown complacent, and their rivals have been catching up. A little competition and fire under
Competition (Score:2)
" A little competition and fire under Google's feet would be good for the industry"
EXACTLY!
I tried DuckDuckGo a couple of months ago and was disappointed with the results.
Truth is if I disregard ads (which is increasingly difficult but still possible), Google is still way better.
If, however, Google blends ads into the results making them indistinguishable... Well, THAT will be the moment to leave Google - but for what??
That would open the door for a paid search service, IMHO.
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Yes, startpage wraps google to be less filter bubbly. But Kagi / Neeva paid options with AI are also quite competitive.
DuckDuck Go which is powered by Bing (I think) used to always have really bad results. IDK if the AI stuff will fix Bing or if this is just marketing fluff to "light a fire" for Google.
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I use DuckDuckGo and I don't think most of its content is powered by Bing - just a few things.
When you search using Bing you get rather different results than DuckDuckGo. It could still be the case that DuckDuckGo uses some of Bing's crawl results, which IMO are distinctly less complete than Google's. DuckDuckGo seems to have a much harder time with most recent version of some piece of information. Sometimes that is actually useful but often it is quite irritating. And Bing's relevance has always seemed
Re: Competition (Score:2)
DuckDuckGo is now a reasonable alternative to Google, but DDG didn't get better. The other way around.
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Exactly this.
I have DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. It used to be that 1/3 of the queries were successful, the other 2/3 were then redone with !g in front, and then usually successful.
Now DDG still handles 1/3 of the queries, but Google only provides reasonable results for 1/3 of the rest.
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I'd expect that the most traffic they get that way are misspelled domain names.
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Have you not heard of "the tyranny of the default" before? What it means is that people overwhelmingly tend to leave the default choices alone. That's why things like opt-in vs opt-out are actually important, or why selection order actually matters.
In this case, with many millions of Samsung users, the default option is that one that many users will first try, and undoubtedly, unless they're highly motivated to change, that's the choice a lot of users will likely leave it as. And Google knows this. Thei
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When it comes to Windows, the general rule is that the good settings is the exact inverse of all default options.
If it's checked, uncheck it. If it's not, check it.
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When it comes to Windows, get a third party tool to actually set ALL the options you can change. Windows doesn't even offer you that option.
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>get a third party tool to actually set ALL the options you can change.
you can download that tool at www.freebsd.org . . . :__)
hawk
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That tool then also runs the software I need that only runs on a Windows machine that isn't virtualized?
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No tool can fix *that much* user error! :)
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Yeah, I've heard about it. In fact, every time I remove the so-called "google" from my search options, I have a little fight with it. So excuse me if I have very little feelings about the tyrant itself.
Google Play Store (Score:2)
Bing is typical Microsoft! (Score:2)
The question is? How much will Microsoft pay Samsung for the change.
Google (Score:3)
I tried to search for some stuff on Google the other day and the results have become garbage. Just page after page of ads.
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Yep, Google is becoming less and less usable. Focus on short-term profits will reliably do that.
Bing isn't that great (Score:2)
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It's not consistent either. Today I entered rsonline.com and it served me first hit as search result, an ad for digikey.com!
Then when I tried again, it sent me directly to the page I entered instead of providing a search result.
This isn't just shady business practices, this is borderline fraud. Charging for clicks on a targeted at for competitor is nasty, but pretending you needed a search result for a website address is bad!
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Oh yes, this even happens if you enter the correct website address!
This is why I started typing a trailing / after all domain names when I type into the address bar. It has become muscle memory at this point.
Bing is still terrible. (Score:2)
I'll just add that to the list of things to fix (Score:2)
Samsung already puts a bunch of extra bullshit on their devices, but my last couple phones and nicest tablets are Samsung devices, so I have a nice long list of things I change as soon as I get a new one. I already ditch absolutely all the Samsung branded software that overlaps Google versions (Calendar, Contacts/Dialer et al) , remove Onedrive and all the Microsoft Office stuff and switch the launcher to one I like better. Samsung is in many ways the least Android of any major OEM and it has abandoned the
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I prefer to use the Google applications that are available to every user than deal with Samsung-specific versions that might not be present on other devices.
I will also say that Samsung Gallery is absolutely infuriating as a device default, since Google Photos might very well be the best general purpose mobile app that exists.
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>get a third party tool to actually set ALL the options you can change.
they're a real blast.
Oh, wait; I'm thinking about their phones . . .
Well there's your problem (Score:2)
People who have no clue what they're doing should not be deciding what "features" to include. Would you let a mechanical engineer fly a jet? If not, why would you think these people are going to get anything done?
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Would you let a mechanical engineer fly a jet?
Those that have pilot's licenses, yes. Some are called test pilots.
Samsung confirms.. (Score:5, Funny)
this isn't even anyone but Google's doing. Their search just plain sucks now. Most of the time it can't even return results on the actual top in your search.
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Re:Samsung confirms.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Honestly, I have been using Bing search for years now and I have not run into any issues where I couldn't find something. It's every bit as good as Google ever was, if not better.
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...and just ask a question like a normal person would.
It's funny you should say that, because I unconsciously made the switch from keyword searches to just asking questions several years ago. It's not that I intended to change the way I used Google search, but rather that I noticed at some point that I unintentionally phrased my search as a question and got good results. I forgot to revert to keyword searches after that, and have been searching with questions ever since.
There are really people who care about this? (Score:2)
Who lets their browser (or whatever) dictate what search engine they use?
For A Fraction Of A Second ... (Score:2)
I thought it was "@Samsung @SamsungMobile will replace #GSOD screens [youtube.com]"
So... (Score:1)
W.T.F.??? (Score:1)
I am fed up with machines categorizing me and my searches, as I am NOT just that.
Just return hits on what I am searching. NOT what you (think) I might like; and then charge another company to post their product to me.
There is a fine line between allowing ME to see everything I search for, and (big brother) suggesting what I want.
This stuff needs to be severely regulated.