Google Paid a Whopping $26.3 Billion in 2021 To Be Default Search Engine Everywhere (theverge.com) 52
The US v. Google antitrust trial is about many things, but more than anything, it's about the power of defaults. Even if it's easy to switch browsers or platforms or search engines, the one that appears when you turn it on matters a lot. Google obviously agrees and has paid a staggering amount to make sure it is the default: testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms. From a report: That number, the sum total of all of Google's search distribution deals, came out during the Justice Department's cross-examination of Google's search head, Prabhakar Raghavan. It was made public after a debate earlier in the week between the two sides and Judge Amit Mehta over whether the figure should be redacted. Mehta has begun to push for more openness in the trial in general, and this was one of the most significant new pieces of information to be shared openly.
Just to put that $26.3 billion in context: Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced in its recent earnings report that Google Search ad business brought in about $44 billion over the last three months and about $165 billion in the last year. Its entire ad business -- which also includes YouTube ads -- made a bit under $90 billion in profit. This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but essentially, Google is giving up about 16 percent of its search revenue and about 29 percent of its profit to those distribution deals.
Just to put that $26.3 billion in context: Alphabet, Google's parent company, announced in its recent earnings report that Google Search ad business brought in about $44 billion over the last three months and about $165 billion in the last year. Its entire ad business -- which also includes YouTube ads -- made a bit under $90 billion in profit. This is all back-of-the-napkin math, but essentially, Google is giving up about 16 percent of its search revenue and about 29 percent of its profit to those distribution deals.
If you really are the best? (Score:3)
It's interesting that Google distinguishes itself among software developers by paying others - rather than being paid by them - to use its software.
If you really were the best search engine, wouldn't you be able to charge others for the service?
Re:If you really are the best? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you really were the best search engine
Contrary to popular belief.... with capitalism it is rarely "the best" product that wins. It's the one that has the best marketing. And in this case, paying to have Google be the default search is just a marketing expense.
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Problem is that google still remains the best search engine. Everything from standard search to scholar to images is better than pretty much all competition.
About the only category where it genuinely fails is things that California brand of woke don't want you to see. That is where you get almost all black cast of "US Scientists" on the first page of image search from typical US account (at least at that specific time slot) and so on. For everything else, it's still either competing for the best slot or is
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I haven't been using Google regularly for at couple of years now, but when I switched away, I noticed that commercially interesting subjects were to a large degree hopeless to find on Google. Spammers would dominate the top.
Re:If you really are the best? (Score:4, Interesting)
I noticed this as well, especially recently. For me, what mostly solves this is searching in my native Finnish for the same subject instead, as this is a much less used language, so much less ad word buying for commercial subjects. But it also limits usefulness of results, as there's less of them as well.
One thing that really annoys me about google is their recent refusal to let me access the "billions of results". Old google, it would just give you almost infinite amount of pages of searches you can go down to look for better results. Then they changed it to "displaying x results" (x= number in low two to low three digits depending on the search) out of "y billions" (y= single to double digit number). Now they just omit the Y for me. It's just that X results shown, and at the end of the page it says:
"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the x already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."
This really limits my ability to search for wide ranging topic. And narrowing it down often just gives less of the same results.
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I tried searching images of "US scientists", and the first black guy is on the second page - Barack Obama. The first face on the first page, and the most frequent face overall s Donald Trump.
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You appear unaware that there was a period when this search delivered nothing but black scientists. This was roundly mocked, at which point a lot of people got banned on the (pre-Elon) twitter for daring to suggest that this sort of rewriting of history is bad. Which is supposedly a racist thing to notice.
Granted, most of the same people are now in full throated support of genocide of Jews, so there's that. That really took a lot of masks off from the woke. But the mocking didn't stop, so google started fid
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If you really were the best search engine
Contrary to popular belief.... with capitalism it is rarely "the best" product that wins. It's the one that has the best marketing. And in this case, paying to have Google be the default search is just a marketing expense.
Some people draw an equivalence between capitalism and a free market. Ironically, many of those free market proponents vehemently decry government regulations and other forms of interference but are fine with private forms of interference that eliminate the "freeness" of the market even more than government measures. Such free market distorting private actions are intended to distort the market to provide a private advantage and only rarely and fortuitously confer a benefit on consumers.
In this case, what
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I might agree on forcing that no default is set and having the user choose on the first use. But, if that were to be done, it should be done on every software where different providers exist for a particular service or function
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More accurately they're paying others for an ad slot. Distinction here is critical, because developers of, for example, mozilla firefox aren't using their own search engine. There's no "own software" being replaced by "google's software". They're looking at the search as an advertisement slot to sell and intentionally do not offer their own software for that feature. Why make the massive effort to build your own search site when you can sell what is effectively an ad placement for good money?
And if they don
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While advertising is no small part of it, one must also mention that search engines require lots of searches to gather good statistics to provide the best results.
Bing does a pretty poor job even finding things on Microsoft's own web pages, while Google gets me to what I want almost always on the first try.
Google does searching well because lots of people use it and the money keeps that in place also.
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Bing is fine for most things as well in my experience. Not as good as google for "general" stuff, slighly better than google at "woke demanding different reality" stuff, i.e. all black cast on image search on "US scientists". It's also quite decent for many of the smaller language searches (i.e. Finnish for me).
But if you're from a specific locale with specific language (other than English), neither google nor bing as good in many cases. I am fluent in Russian and yandex utterly crushes both google and bing
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Most people in US tend to forget that English is a minority language on the internet
English is #1 is languages spoken:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
and is by far the most commonly spoken second language:
English takes the crown as the most common second language around the world with 55 countries speaking it as a second language. France and Russia are second and third with 14 and 13 respectively.
https://www.movehub.com/blog/g... [movehub.com].
So I guess you're saying that all of those English speakers switch to Hindi when they hop online?
PS, what language are we using now? Huh.
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Have you tried applying reading comprehension to English text in the previous post yet? Because none of your statements interact with claims you quote in any way. I in no way addressed the amount of speakers of any language, be it first, second, or twentieth.
I merely commented on available content on the internet and the fact that it's completely segregated by linguistic walls, and that no language is a majority language on the internet. Making each segregated linguistic area of the internet quite distinct
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I merely commented on available content on the internet and the fact that it's completely segregated by linguistic walls,
Yes, I saw what you wrote. It's right above this, for all to see. It was this:
Most people in US tend to forget that English is a minority language on the internet.
You're wrong. Feel free to link any evidence you want, like I did. Here's some more for you:
As of January 2023, English was the most popular language for web content, representing nearly 59 percent of websites. Russian ranked second, with 5.3 percent of web content, while the content in the Spanish language followed, with 4.3 percent.
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com].
and that no language is a majority language on the interne
Well, you didn't say that, but anyway. Of course some language is a majority. Do you know what "majority" means? Maybe you meant to say "no language is dominant?" Regardless, english is the majority, and dominant.
If nothing else, you are one data point about the use of English.
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Ah yes, quoting statista, which primarily does anglosphere crawling.
Like I said, most people don't really understand just how segregated by language web is. There's almost no cross-linking. Which is why crawlers like what statista uses for its numbers are very poor at determining actual content in other languages. It's a known problem too, this is why of the several web data aggregators, they have wildly different numbers of these topics. Because they have different settings for non-English web. And that's
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For a while, Firefox, Bing edition was a thing. Microsoft paid Mozilla to be the default search engine for a brief time in 2011.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech... [cnet.com]
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It's not just that. For a while, regional search engines were kings for Firefox installs in their region/in their language. I don't know if mozilla still keeps this principle, or it's a general ad placement for "all languages and regions" now.
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paying others ... to use its software
But they don't even do that. They pay the device manufacturers/integrators to install it*. We are expected to use it for free.
Where's my $26.3 billion?
*To be fair, say Google pays Samsung $5 per tablet to configure it's search as the default. That's $5 off the price of the device that Samsung could charge me. Yeah, right. It also brings up an interesting philosophical question: How do you asses the economics (dumping, antitrust, etc.) surrounding a product that has a negative price?
I wanna say good enough is good enough (Score:3)
On the other hand, my lord Google sucks lately. Especially on mobile chrome. It's like 10 pages of adverts before getting to the lousy search results that are full of adverts....
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They gotta make back that $26B somehow. Takes a lot of ad impressions to total up to that mountain of cash.
Re: If you really are the best? (Score:1)
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Try not to confuse or conflate any other justification against the sheer unrelenting power of mass apathy that drove a company to spend $26 billion because they know how lazy their audience truly is, with 99% of consumers not changing a damn thing beyond the default settings they paid billions for.
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Shockingly, most people don't even care about the search engine choice, because they just want to use Google anyway. That's what brand recognition combined with "works good enough" and "not a UX disaster that annoys the shit out of me" gets you.
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You aren't thinking about who the customer really is. Here's a hint: it's not the company that is embedding Google search in their product. They're simply the middle-man being paid to deliver their customers' eyeballs to Google's advertising. And the people who pay to have Google show their ads are really the customers.
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If you really were the best search engine, wouldn't you be able to charge others for the service?
Not when everyone else is paying. If Bing offers $100 billion, and Google offers nothing, nobody is picking Google regardless of how great it it.
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>If you really were the best search engine, wouldn't you be able to charge others for the service?
Not if there were other players who would also pay to be the default search engine. The power of defaults is a Real Thing (tm). Just because you are the "best", don't expect anyone to get off their arse and get your product. They are too lazy. Only a few of them will do so.
Let's take a browser manufacturer. What is his incentive to have the "best" search as his splash page? His own rebranded search wil
And they destroyed Windows Phone (Score:2)
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Don't forget the fate of Lotus, Novell, OS/2...
They'd find a way to break Proton/Wine, any number of ways, same as they did with OS/2. Ballmer running around a Comdex (big computer show from yesteryear, for the kids) with a floppy crashing OS/2 machines was just a public display of it.
"DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" wasn't just a joke, at least back in the mid-1980s. Novell's client was the 1990s version of this.
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Novell's client was the 1990s version of this.
No, the real version from the 1990s was QuickTime. Which landed them in real legal trouble that they had to buy their way out of, because Apple was about to fuck them bigtime over stealing QuickTime code through a common 3rd party to use in Video for Windows.
Apple just didn't have the resources to see it all the way through for years while bleeding red ink, so they settled. Both companies came out ok, but We The Users have been suffering since.
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Probably not. Yes, admittedly, anything MS makes is total crap, but Google is not that much better these days. As soon as they get large, they get fat, lazy, stupid and incompetent. No exceptions.
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Imagine having $26,300,000,000 to waste (Score:2)
That's $26,300,000,000 they could have spent keeping google reader running until the the end of the universe.
I know, it's shock to me too that all it took was just $875,000,000 per day to keep it going.
NASA's 2021 budget was $23.3 billion (Score:3)
For scale reference. Unrelated, but an interesting comparison I believe (one company's default search engine spending vs all spending by a top country on space endeavors).
https://www.planetary.org/spac... [planetary.org]
Thereby conclusive demonstrating... (Score:2)
... how technologically inept and clueless the general public is
It's TRIVIAL to change search
So? (Score:2)
Google? Who is that? (Score:2)
Must not have used them in several years now except very rarely to find out "oh, they do not find it either".
Apple's gross profit in 2021 was ~$150B (Score:2)
So, this amount is something like 15-20% of Apple's profits that year.
The fate of Mozilla lies herein (Score:2)
86% of Mozilla's 2021 revenue came from Google [techcrunch.com] in these payoffs, lowered from the prior year's 88% due in part to laying off a few large teams.
They've been preparing for this, but they're not ready. I worry about the future of Mozilla if the courts say Alphabet can't bribe them to place Google as the default search engine. Then the world loses the only feasible competitive web rendering engine from a different codebase. Mozilla's layoffs already doomed Servo [wikipedia.org], which was an experimental engine that served a
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They champion privacy without the conflicts of interest
False. I use Firefox so I'm not hating on it but there are conflict of interest problems with it too. I used to use ScrapBook+ to save webpages as displayed. You could load a page, monkey with your script settings, maybe use one of the many tools to remove elements from the page, and then save the result. When Mozilla removed the old plugin model they removed the functionality that ScrapBook+ and other addons were using to do this in the name of security. Then they spent $20M of donation money on Pocket, wh
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Hey Google (Score:2)
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My guess is "yes" considering their ad sales are up 9% year-over-year [apnews.com], and they booked $59.65B in advertising revenue in the most recent quarter [reuters.com].
Spending $26B on multi-year agreements to help protect over $200B in annual ad revenue is the very definition of a no-brainer.
Why? (Score:3)
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You seem to be under the impression that the best product wins in the marketplace.
That hasn't been the case in ages.
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Blame the payees (Score:2)