According to newly released court documents, Safari’s default search engine is absurdly, insanely valuable to Google. Why? Because it’s the de facto homepage of the web, allowing Google to track everything you do without restriction.
Google responds to illegal monopoly
How valuable? In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion to become the default Safari search engine. That figure likely represents the amount of money Apple could take from Google with the threat—either explicit or implicit—that it could easily replace Google Search with Bing or DuckDuckGo. And where would Google be then, driven off the iPhone?
"Apple currently has the most popular smartphone in the world. This deal gives Google the default search engine on the most popular phone in the world. Since most people never bother to change their default search engine settings, this is a good business decision for Google," technology expert Daivat Dholakia told Lifewire via email.
Little by little, Google has become the way most of us access the Internet. We don’t type Google.com into our browsers. We simply type the search term or the name of the website we want to visit. Most people I see using browsers treat the URL bar as if it were Google. They don’t even type URLs anymore. They just Google them and click on the first result.
