Google's insistence on paying the $15B a year is odd to me. I'm sure they've run a bunch of experiments and they view it as making sense financially but I'm not sure how many people would settle with Bing as default search. Their #1 search term being "Google" is pretty telling.
You can also view the $15 billion as a bribe to prevent apple from trying its hand at search. Apple already has a substantial search effort behind the scenes
That doesn't make sense though. If they are already working on it why would Google fund that. Doesn't really make sense as a bribe. Additionally, I don't think Google is worried about a search competitor. It's all about the default search eyeballs. Microsoft has invested an insane amount to Bing and after 13 years they have 3% market share.
Sure it does. Apple isn't short of funding. If they think a search engine would be profitable they have the capital. Whats the $15 billion does is this:
1. Controls the default. Lots of people never change it, so Google gets more customers, worth more than $15 billion
2. Starves potential competitors of revenue such as Bing
3. Reduces Apple's incentive to go full tilt into search engine development. They now have to give up $15 billion
Apple's new ads business changes the calculus though and they may have more incentive to deploy a search engine in the near future
I always wondered why Facebook didn't make their own search engine considering how massive their userbase is and how much technical know-how and experience they have. But then pretty soon I realized it's all about distribution; Google controls Web distribution through Google Chrome, that's what makes them powerful. They can always promote their search engine through Google Chrome which has huge market share among Internet Browsers.
$15 billion makes no sense to me as well; why would you give that huge amount of money to some other company no matter how big and important they are if you believe that you search engine is the best in the world. That makes me conclude that Google has doubts in their own search engine and they are indeed afraid of Bing or some other search engine replacing them pretty soon and pretty quickly in the future.
Nono. It's largely because defaults are powerful. A lot of people simply don't change what they start with. If google has the default they get more money, more than $15 billion, plus they blunt competitors.
