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Google’s antitrust trial revealed the multi-billion dollar tech company paid out a whopping total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to keep its status as the default search engine on phones and multiple browsers, Bloomberg Law reported Friday.
The Justice Department argued that by spending an exorbitant amount of money to retain its default status, Google is ensuring the market isn’t competitive with other search engines.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president and search head, revealed the gigantic numbers during his testimony, according to Bloomberg Law.
He claimed Amazon is one of two of Google’s most formidable competitors and said the company stayed ahead of it and other search engines by relentlessly increasing its research and development.
Raghavan claimed Google remains a top search engine because of its quality and ease of use, saying users can switch to Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo if they choose.
“Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won’t change them,” DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta during a hearing in Washington, CNBC reported.
It doesn’t matter how good a secondary product is, most users will stay with the default out of a mix of (lack of) expertise and apathy. What this tells me is that the average user makes Google substantially more than this amount after all other expenses are added in.
Google (well, Alphabet) is worth over 1.5T dollars. They could have paid this and made the search engine better. You imply that Google is a poor (general purpose) search engine, but Google became Google by being a better search engine than all the others and, afaik, hasn’t really lost that position. It’s been enshitified by the increase in advertising volume and by the natural language model which benefits non-technical users at the expense of more syntactically exact power users, but neither of those speak to the core algorithm.
That is true, until it isnt anymore.
At one point Google will become so shitty and other search engines much better, that everyone will start to switch over, but at that point its too late for Google to do anything about it.
But thats somehow beyond the grasp of every shareholder ever (or they plan on selling the stock in a few years anyway).
TBH, 26.3 billion dollars are just a drop in the bucket for Google. That bucket of course filled with the money they got with industrial scale spying, cross-site tracking, denial of control, forced ads, destruction of competition, among countless dirty tricks they play on regular netizens.
Yet, in a redacted copy of an internal email chain released on Friday, Jim Kolotouros, the vice president of Android Platform Partnerships, wrote: “Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero (for me).”
So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search’s whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.
Dunno about “the last update” or the current state in each region but as far as I know the default search engine in FireFox has varied over the years and has always depended what country you’re in.
Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo are / have been the default in some countries. They made Bing the default for “1%” of users in a bunch of major countries recently to test the waters (and didn’t take it further than that).
Google blocks traffic from Chinese IP addresses as a protest against censorship there, so nobody has Google as the default in that country.
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For anyone who doesn’t click the link, Google paid $26.3 billion.
What?!? That’s huge
🤖 I’m a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
Google’s antitrust trial revealed the multi-billion dollar tech company paid out a whopping total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to keep its status as the default search engine on phones and multiple browsers, Bloomberg Law reported Friday.
The Justice Department argued that by spending an exorbitant amount of money to retain its default status, Google is ensuring the market isn’t competitive with other search engines.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president and search head, revealed the gigantic numbers during his testimony, according to Bloomberg Law.
He claimed Amazon is one of two of Google’s most formidable competitors and said the company stayed ahead of it and other search engines by relentlessly increasing its research and development.
Raghavan claimed Google remains a top search engine because of its quality and ease of use, saying users can switch to Microsoft’s Bing or DuckDuckGo if they choose.
“Google invests billions in defaults, knowing people won’t change them,” DOJ attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta during a hearing in Washington, CNBC reported.
Saved 54% of original text.
Imagine if they put a fraction of that money into…I donno…actually making their search algorithmically competitive.
Who needs competition when you’re a monopoly on the whole internet lmao.
Right? My takeaway from this is that it was cheaper for them to do this than it was to make a good search engine.
It doesn’t matter how good a secondary product is, most users will stay with the default out of a mix of (lack of) expertise and apathy. What this tells me is that the average user makes Google substantially more than this amount after all other expenses are added in.
Google (well, Alphabet) is worth over 1.5T dollars. They could have paid this and made the search engine better. You imply that Google is a poor (general purpose) search engine, but Google became Google by being a better search engine than all the others and, afaik, hasn’t really lost that position. It’s been enshitified by the increase in advertising volume and by the natural language model which benefits non-technical users at the expense of more syntactically exact power users, but neither of those speak to the core algorithm.
That is true, until it isnt anymore. At one point Google will become so shitty and other search engines much better, that everyone will start to switch over, but at that point its too late for Google to do anything about it.
But thats somehow beyond the grasp of every shareholder ever (or they plan on selling the stock in a few years anyway).
5.25 billion smartphone users, so they are paying about $5 per user. If you switch the default from Google, you are taking $5 from them!
I actually use Bing so that I get Microsoft Rewards points, meaning I gain money by not using Google.
But I understand privacy homies going DuckDuckGo or something else.
TBH, 26.3 billion dollars are just a drop in the bucket for Google. That bucket of course filled with the money they got with industrial scale spying, cross-site tracking, denial of control, forced ads, destruction of competition, among countless dirty tricks they play on regular netizens.
They made a $40b profit last year. More than half their profits is a “drop in the bucket”?!
They played the game of thrones well
So Chrome’s whole point is bringing users to Google Search… and Google Search’s whole point is Google Ads. I’m Glad I use Firefox.
Cut the snake by the head.
Problem solved.
In the last update of firefox google was redefaulted as search engine. Wonder if such roll out costs extra?
Was it anything else before?
Dunno about “the last update” or the current state in each region but as far as I know the default search engine in FireFox has varied over the years and has always depended what country you’re in.
Baidu, Yandex and Yahoo are / have been the default in some countries. They made Bing the default for “1%” of users in a bunch of major countries recently to test the waters (and didn’t take it further than that).
Google blocks traffic from Chinese IP addresses as a protest against censorship there, so nobody has Google as the default in that country.
I dont know if the last update was any bigger update, but at least several updates before my engine was not changed.
I have no damn idea as I see Firefox as a Platform.
github.com/trytomakeyouprivate/Arkenfox-softening
And what does that make Android’s whole point? 😉