> Apple does not sell user data to third parties

Oh, of course they do:

> Apple’s Sharing of Personal Data

> Apple may share personal data with service providers who act on our behalf, our partners, or others at your direction. Further, Apple does not share personal data with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

> Partners. At times, Apple may partner with third parties to provide services or other offerings. For example, Apple financial offerings like Apple Card and Apple Cash are offered by Apple and our partners. Apple requires its partners to protect your personal data.

They share it, they just don't share your data “with third parties for their own marketing purposes”, no additional privacy guarantees.

source: https://www.apple.com/legal/privacy/en-ww/

None of that describes selling data to third parties. The third parties that might receive data as described in this section are vendors or partners, not customers. Apple isn't making money off the sale of data here.

Google and Facebook also don't sell data. They keep the data and charge advertisers to take advantage of their ability to target using the data.

> Apple isn't making money off the sale of data here.

There's zero mention of that in the aforementioned policy. This policy completely allows them to make money in their deals with their «partners» or even their «service providers» and you wouldn't know it.

For instance, Apple pay is a payment service and I would be really surprised if they didn't get paid by their partner for every transaction made through them. (And yes, a transaction is «personal data»).

And since they are a for profit company, they obviously intend to make money (even if it's not through their partner paying them directly but through indirect revenue sources like customer retention or acquisition) when making partnership, because otherwise they wouldn't make such partnerships!

Well, Google is the best search engine, and Apple wants the best user experience. This has the feel of getting paid $15b to do something you were going to do anyways.

Is it the best search engine anymore? Seems like the web is an seo hellhole when I’m looking for real information.

I've encouraged numerous non-technical friends and family members to switch to DuckDuckGo and they've all gone back to Google within a week.

Although my default is DDG and I am technical, but I still find myself heading back to Google in case DDG disappoints. and that happens frequently (although definitely not always)

I had the same problem with DDG. I use Bing now. It may not be as ideal as DDG, but it's not Google and I seldom have difficulty finding what I'm searching for.

That's my experience as well. I'm on DDG for a few months now, and I often resort to using Google when DDG doesn't give me the results I want.

How much of that is down to them missing the familiar look of the Google results page?

I wish we could do a blind study where users were asked to use a white-labeled search page where the results are served by Google or Bing (or others), but not disclosed. They would be asked to use that engine exclusively for 3 months, and rank their satisfaction with it.

I imagine the results would be similar, but people would still feel a pull towards Google because it's been around for 20 years.

I dont understand how people make these claims. For web search, Google is obviously better but for other classes of queries like question answering of structured knowledge or video search, it’s way better.

Ask DuckDuckGo for “Shang chi cast” and compare that with Google.

Or look at how it now returns search results that contain deep links into VIDEOs at the exact time index that is relevant.

(I think this may be done with VideoBERT and if you search for that it will return deep links into a videobert presentation!)

In any case Apple would have along long way to go to match what Google is doing. Search is no longer just TFIDF and 20 blue links.

Microsoft did something like this almost a decade ago.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/bing-it-on-microsoft-claim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bing#Bing_It_On

It was marginal, in favor of Bing, though I don't think they did extended experiments with individuals.

I really think DDG should at least search for results of "my" country by default. Otherwise it's just too annoying for the regular user. Aside from that, I like DDG more than Google.

Yes.

I use DDG as my default. The bang syntax is great for quick pivots and for wikipedia-like information. However, digging deep into a topic or doing certain technical searches brings up SEO hell/malicious PDFs worse than Google ever does.

Yes it is. I have tried 6 others and all of them give much much worse results in lots of cases. It won’t matter if you search something popular, but otherwise you notice the difference.

The other day I was watching somebody search "Mass Effect Legendary Edition Ultrawide Support" while logged in to Google. They repeatedly got nothing but results for Heroes of the Storm, a completely different game which they had been playing a few days earlier. It was the creepiest thing. HotS is not a very popular game. I guarantee that most people searching "$VIDEO_GAME Ultrawide Support" are not looking for HotS info.

Anyway, on Bing and DDG both the first page of results were what I would have expected. Just like they would have been on Google ten years ago.

That query works well for me on Google.

I don't doubt it. I believe it was a results personalization issue. A history of queries related to one game caused it to include that game in all game-related queries. Maybe exacerbated by the heroes:legendary relationship? Who knows. I don't even recognize the Google algorithm year to year anymore. I don't expect to be able to reproduce anything.

It's the best algorithm I would say, but the site itself has quite horrid design these days.

If Apple popped up a list on install of search engines to pick from, 99% of people would pick Google anyway. Google is mostly afraid they will buy a startup and have their own or make the same deal with M$. At $15B of pure bottom line, it is an easy choice for Apple. We can only stop this with taxes on digital advertising. The tracking companies have become too good at fingerprinting. Even if everything was completely random and anonymized from the iPhone side, the carriers/ISPs can fingerprint you so much easier and they'll never stop (probably not even with regulation).

Makes me wonder why they have to pay 15b in the first place. If it’s indeed a no-brainer for apple, the deal could be made with far less money?

I'd imagine with $15B Apple could bootstrap its own search engine.

There are getting 15B to NOT boostrap their search engine. If they bootstrap their own engine, they loose 15B on top of having to pay to build this own engine.

Exactly. Plenty of risks involved - they could just fail like Microsoft did, or if they pull it off it could seriously upset the balance in the ecosystem. Better reach a mutually beneficial agreement with everyone's "favorite" search company instead. Coopetition lol

Not worth it. It's not cheap maintaining a search engine. Apple could throw resources at it but what is the benefit? This is different than the Maps issue where Google refuse to provide new features for iPhone Maps. Apple used OpenStreetMaps (OSM) and created their own. By using OSM, it gave that project more visibility and others an alternative solution to Google Maps. A few years later Google suddenly makes it "not so free" for businesses displaying a map, they better put up a credit card.

Google search is completely gamed, as are Bing and others that rely on the same list of ranking factors. Besides the visual difference between Bing/Google results page, I doubt iPhone users would be able to tell who was serving the results.

What's the alternative? Should Safari choose a default search engine by random per user or per session? Google is undoubtedly the best search engine in nearly all cases. Should Apple subject its users to a weaker engine just because Google has a different privacy policy? You can also change the default search engine.

Why wouldn't Apple accept a payment for bringing billions of dollars in traffic to Google?

Apple subjects it's user to a highest bidder. You can't seriously try to claim Apple is using Google as "best search engine" minute after seeing they are getting 15B for it.

Google is by far the best search engine.

Google pays Apple to set it as the default as its a positive sum to both sides. Google gets more than $15bn of value from the traffic and Apple gets $15bn for the obvious decision. Google could call Apple's bluff and refuse to pay, but Apple could pull through on their threat to replace default search with an inferior engine. They did it with Google Maps by replacing it with Apple Maps, which was a widely unpopular decision

They did it with Google and replaced it with Bing awhile back.

Weaker... According to whom? I particularly use DDG on my personal devices and only occasionally go to Google. Whenever I'm using a machine that use Google as the default, I often go back to DDG to get results unspoiled by the bias pushed by Google's agenda, SEO and paid ads.

But answering your question, it could let the user choose their search engine as part of the onboarding experience while providing a random preselected default.

I've been using Brave:

https://search.brave.com/

For my usage it gives good results, and it has the added bonus of providing links to google et al when you scroll down the results (it assumes that if the first page of results isn't good enough then the user will go elsewhere, so why not provide links to the other search engines?).

+1 for Brave search. I had used DDG for a couple years before and it was fine, but Brave actually seems good.

(I don't like their font but that's an easy fix with userstyles.)

I wanted to try brave, but it’s not even an option for safari iOS search main search bar! Only options are Google, yahoo, bing, ddg, and ecosia

Could you set it as your home-page? Obviously not as nice as going via the URL-bar, but at least you'll be able to get a taste of it.

Yes but honestly if it’s not in the url bar I’m not going to use it.

Wouldn't it be cheaper for Apple to just buy DDG or Brave?

I think you might be right.

How many people actually want to switch from Google?

I think the bigger question is how many people would notice a switch? My family members now "google" stuff on DDG.

Google are paying tens of billions to keep them in the "default" dominant position because they know this.

Google results have fallen dramatically in terms of quality. I’d switch from current Google to Google circa 2018

It's kind of like how the NSA has deals with other countries like the UK to allow spying on Americans to get around constitutional issues. Hey, we didn't do the spying! We're privacy focused. We just make billions by allowing other companies to spy on you, and we make it the default position. Plausible deniability at the corporate level.

How does having a default web search engine equate to "[Company] is sending *all* search traffic to [other company]"?

Users have preferences and may change the engines they search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.

95 % of users never touch predefined settings, so being the default almost always equates to being the "winner".

What they should do instead is to let people select a search engine based on different criteria (including privacy friendliness). Most people would then still choose Google but the effect would be way less pronounced.

Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.

The only thing pointing people to DDG or some inferior search engine would be to frustrate non-technical people when their search results become "weird".

Not all search engines are the same. I use DDG by default but I admit there is a huge difference between the two search engines and I use !g more than I'd like to admit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

>Microsoft Edge would like to have a word with you.

The 95% statistic only works when you introduce new, hidden option. People used Chrome/Firefox/whatever before Edge, they are used to it, and it's their default.

>Users have preferences and may change the engines they search with, not use Safari at all or be already using Google anyway.

Well Google ofcourse clearly diasgree given they are willing to pay 15 billion dollars.

Some people will use it just because it's the default. Apple is paid because of that. So Apple is selling user data, i.e. violating privacy for money

some =/= all,

which is the point I was addressing in my original comment.

"Like, Apple does not sell user data to third parties and Apple is sending all search traffic to Google by default for $15B a year."

Or like, Mozilla is working to protect user privacy^1 and Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default for [much less than $15B] a year.

In each case, we can see two conflicting interests/objectives. Data collection versus privacy protection. Being honest, which is the one we can say is making the most progress at the expense of the other. How much data is being collected. How much data is off-limits. How much money is being "lost" by "tech" companies to privacy protection (user self-determination). Be honest.

1 And other noble causes, including maintaining a "healhty" web. Read: Ensuring online advertising does not die out.

>Mozilla is sending all search traffic to Google by default for...much less

And not just much less overall...

Mozilla is supposedly getting ~$400M/year. Which is $115M per percentage point of marketshare. The $15B for Apple is $804M per percentage point of marketshare.

Which I suppose makes sense, as iPhone users probably automatically fall into a high income demographic.

What I used for market share: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share

Even if a user pivots from Safari, keeping Google as the default is keeping it as the default in the minds of users as they move to a different browser.

I'm sure it's net positive for users in both cases.

Apple doesn't sell Google data of users' actions on other websites or in other apps.

And Mozilla really did a lot for user privacy using that Google money.

Apple makes it easy enough to switch the "search engine used from the URL bar" if you care to.

“Apple makes is very easy to stop sending your user data to third parties.”

Better?