Axios:
Apple CEO Tim Cook says his company views privacy as a “core value” that goes back before the iPhone. In an interview with “Axios on HBO,” Cook defended taking billions from Google to make its search engine the default setting on the iPhone.
I wonder how much of this is Cook simply being pragmatic?
I can’t think of what the superior alternative would have been at the time.
And, well, Google Search isn’t all that much of a privacy issue if your browser isn’t signed in to your Google account.
Which mine isn’t; I use Google’s apps for Docs, and Mail for GMail.
I tried switching to Duck Duck Go and Bing. Sadly, nothing measures up to the evil empire for search.
All of it was pragmatism. What are the other choices?
1) Bing. Could handle the load in all likelihood but results are not as good.
2) DuckDuckGo. Good but not great results and probably not able to handle the load
3) Build their own. Huge undertaking, not their core competency and unlikely to yield results as good as Google in the near term or even ever.
how about being agnostic?
Same experience many fall into, unfortunately. I have Duck Duck Go as my default search engine now. If I can’t find what I am looking for, I switch to Google. Though to be honest, DDG does a pretty good job when I look at the results from both.
Yup. yet again another damned if they do, damned if they don’t, scenario.
I read somewhere the POTUS suggested, “just build a table of contents.” 😉
Same here.
Said while showing Californians how to rake a forest floor, no doubt. Golly, he’s so smart.
Well, there has to be a default, in practice, if only because nobody wants to deal with “pick your search engine from this randomized list”, outside of maybe EU bureaucrats, who are awful.
It was always, IIRC, agnostic in the sense of letting you pick whatever search engine…
Not to mention if they switched away from Google one of their number one questions would become “How do I switch to Google?”
Might as well save users the trouble AND get paid.
Here, have some paper towels! He is the answer man.
I tried DDG and it was a mediocre to terrible experience. The other thing I discovered is that DDG is much dumber than Google when Safe Search is off. I was searching for the pins that pregnant women wear on the Tube to have people stand up. Google figured out what I was looking for, DDG reminded me of doing a search for images in 1999.
Doesn’t #3 equally apply to Maps when they rolled it out.
Yep. Remember the bitching when they did that?
And a great humanitarian, too!
I think a lot of disappointment is with results in which I want a quick answer, “what time is sunset” “how many ounces in a cup” things like that. But as far as actual results, DDG, and even Bing are getting there, which is good of course. Search for “bing-vs-duckduckgo-vs-google-search-comparison-2018”, Business Insider did a decent review of all three. I’ll stick with DDG, and when I can’t find what I need switch to google. Privacy is too important to me. Even if you are not logged in, your IP is still recorded. It’s too much tracking for me. May not mean anything, but you never know.
Most of the times I’m using serach is for news or pretty precise/power search situations. In both of those cases, Google mops the floor with DDG.
Well yea, I don’t expect Google map results. Then it’s a competition between whatever map program you have on your Mac. In my case Apple Maps is what DDG points to.
I’ve not yet searched for news though. I’ve only really been using DDG for about 3 or 4 months as the default.
Maps I’m less concerned about. I give DDG a shot every few years, it lasts a month or two, then realize how much it disrupts my flow and then abandon it. A friend of mine joked that DDG is optimized for open source coders since they’re the only ones who insist that it’s just as good as Google.
I’ll stick it out for a while and see what happens. If I find I am heading to google more and more, I may do the same. But, like you, I’ll keep checking out the competition every now and then.
My sincere hope in all this is that Google takes some of that dough and invests it in making Google Apps (Doc, Slides, Sheets, Drive, etc) work on iOS.