We face a number of challenges simply letting our paying customers change their search engine:
1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.
2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.
3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.
There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.
I’m one of the paying Kagi customer who wants to make Kagi my default iOS search engine, but cannot. It’s maddening that even though I paid for both my iPhone / iPad and for Kagi, Apple for some reason makes it impossible for me to make this choice (that I already made by paying for Kagi).
On Chrome at least this is possible, even if it’s additional steps (I have not used the extension though there.)
So far (only an occasional user) it's been solid for me. Though I've only been using it in depth every few weeks, and that's mostly to read manga online while waiting for stuff.
I too am a paying customer. Surprisingly -- at least to me -- it's easy to do with Microsoft's Edge browser on iOS. I use it as default on both iOS and macOS.
They recently decoupled that part (search, but I don't know if they did it for edge too) and made bing in the start menu a store app that can be uninstalled if you don't want it to be available on your system anymore.
The only reason why you can't use google there is because.. Google doesn't care. Just like how they never released apps for the Windows Phone store, they have no intention of touching the one on Windows.
Microsoft has been hit so many times by the EU that they really care to respect our regulations now. Not just the "letter of the law" but the "spirit of the law" too.
The same should (or has already happened, I don't know.. because I actually use Edge and didn't care to look deeper into it) happen for Edge:
Of note, among the things that have changed recently in Windows 11, you can disable the news page from msn on Widgets, and Teams is no longer a part of Windows.
I expect Google will release their implementation when the Windows feature gets into stable. Implementing something 9 years after Windows 10 is released doesn't show "respecting the EU" to me.
Correct. Minute userbase equals no leverage to extract tolls. If they ended up with the sort of dominant position they had at one point with IE on Mac they'd do this very thing and more.
There aren't many shenanigans that MS didn't pioneer in the 90s.
Because the money for it is stuck in weird places. I can't write some small bit of software and just sell that for a decent price. People don't pay for software these days, so my best hope is to give it away for free and then running ads. And then, if it's any good, someone will come by and make an open source clone and give that away for free, tanking sales/ad revenue. So the money in writing software is by working at a huge company that has found money with software, like Google and selling ads.
This is really the most concise (and depressing) explanation of the situation I've seen.
When I was a kid, I dreamt of being a solo programmer that had a few successful desktop programs. Think mIRC, WinAmp, WinRar. Despite the audience for that being >100x larger than it was in the 90s, I'd bet the number of solo shops doing that successfully isn't a whole lot larger than it was then.
I recommend trying out Quiche Browser on iOS, or Orion from Kagi- both will support Kagi as a search option. Spotlight search still goes to Google, but I find that acceptable.
You chose to buy a platform with severe restrictions. It's not like we can blame monopoly power, because Android phones are easy to get. It was legitimately your choice - it seems like for some reason you wanted the restrictions.
Choice seems to be an euphemism for everything related to private IT: For PCs there is Microsoft vs Apple. (I use Linux, but that's not for the broad masses currently.) For phones you either pay a premium to enter the Apple walled garden or you prostitute your digital life and get spied on by Google and its advertising cancer.
What would we say if there were only 2 car makers, 2 grocery chains, 2 companies building houses?
Look no further for evidence than New Zealand. There are two major grocery store chains (Foodstuffs, who own New World, Four Square, and Pak n Save) and Woolworths Group -- obviously we have the smaller Asian marts and produce stores too, but most people only have one of the big stores nearby to their towns.
There are two major building materials suppliers (Carters and Fletchers). There's one manufacturer of drywall (Gib) that is easier to get council plan approval for than any other cheaper manufacturers of drywall because they provide some material strength documents that saves the councils some engineering review time and effort.
We technically have 4 major banks, but 3 of them are just offshoots of big Australian banks and siphon the insane profits offshore.
The government keeps making investigation commissions into breaking these up, but doesn't do anything. The companies just point fingers back and forth at each other blaming "the competition" for price gouging. Meanwhile the recommendation from the politicians is we cut back on avocado toast, lattes, and our Netflix subscription.
Finland is nearly as bad. 20 years ago there were only 3 food chains. All domestic and playing the rules "no price competition". So food prices were about 30% higher than in Germany for example (these a very different countries so lack of competition is only one reason). Then Lidl (discounter of German origin) entered the market. The first years the incumbents fought it with unfair practices, but in the end it led to more price competition with everybody having to offer cheaper choices. 2 of the incumbents have since merged (with some regulatory limitations) so we are back to 3 players, 2 playing "according to the oligopoly book" and one doing things different, at least offering some choice.
Banks are not much better. There are a couple of small players additionally to the 3 big ones, but competition is limited to very few products. If you are interested in something else, choices are very poor.
If the choices are substantially different, you have a choice. Windows or Linux or Mac is a real choice - just because you'd prefer Haiku doesn't mean you don't have a choice. There's a huge range of android phones, and many of them have been reverse engineered enough to run non-google versions of Android (find out before buying). I have a PinePhone, but I don't use it regularly. It runs nearly-mainline Linux. Even things like Apache and X11 if I want it to.
I am typing this on a phone running SailfishOS. Still that's hardly a real choice for me who has worked 20 years as a phone or Linux developer. No banks, no public transit tickets, no city bike, no you name it.
Calls a texts work fine. I didn't try MMS, but on the forums people managed to make it work. Battery life is not very long, 4-5 hours of use or 20 hours of suspend.
I'm really happy to be able to run desktop apps (also on a big screen!) and have full control over my phone.
Compromise on your computing freedom, compromise on your attention and privacy, when both providers are out to fuck you it doesn't really feel like you have a meaningful choice to make. Asking for an environment where fucking your customers isn't allowed feels like the only option.
I have a Pixel with Graphene on it. It's not de-Googled though, because Google successfully entrenched their services as a dependency of the majority of apps on the platform. Graphene makes yet another compromise by installing Play Services in a sandbox, which still lets it spy on you (but less) in exchange for enabling most (not all) Android apps to run. You can't really escape the compromises if you want a capable pocket computer. Compromises borne not of technical requirements or limitations, but of decisions that some of the largest companies in human history have made to fuck you.
Big fan of Graphene! The balance I personally prefer is to use Shelter to create a "work profile" and install Play Services in there along with any apps that must have Play Services. Then, I only enable the work profile when I need to use those apps.
I don't know about "factually incorrect" I believe this[1] is what the OP was vaguely referring to.
Apple says they're not doing CSAM scanning anymore, but there's no way to verify they're being truthful. And given everything known about corporate America, it would be foolish to believe them.
Unfortunately, you lose a significant amount of functionality by degoogling. Any app which relies on Google services, which is a large number, will be broken.
But you do. You get to choose to buy into the other platform, which is significantly more open. If for some reason you choose not to, then you obviously don't value openness very much.
In what sane healthy market is two choices enough?
Imagine saying that about everything else in your life. Don't want to buy a Ford car? You can buy a Toyota. There are no other car brands in the entire world. IHG, Hyatt, Choice Hotels, Best Western, Wyndham, Radisson, they don't exit.
Don't want to stay at the Hilton? You're in luck, you can go to the Mariott, that's it.
Don't want to buy a t-shirt at Target? Well, Walmart sells t-shirts, and nobody else sells any t-shirts.
This would be astoundingly ridiculous anywhere else but technoloy. Even credit card processing networks have four options (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express).
As an example of how this works in other industries, US antitrust regulators automatically decline any merger/acquisition US airlines that would put their marketshare above 20%. And that's after deregulation!
IMO any market that has less than ~3-5 viable purchase options for customers needs to have extensive government intervention to keep the market fair and innovative.
If only the world was so simple and one dimensional and we never needed to compromise. Lets have 5 phones, each representing the pinnacle of a single attribute I care about, none of them actually meeting my needs.
Yay, capitalism working as intended. The rational buyer can choose to get kicked in the head or in the groin! Vote with your money!
That’s why even Adam Smith himself said that it only works in well-defined markets! It’s the job of governments to define these, and phones are so essential to our lives that they should be thought of as roads, instead of as an average private company.
Apple and Google have a duopoly in the mobile OS markets and mobile app markets. The fig-leaf of choice is between two duopolists. That's not healthy competition or an actual choice.
As someone who worked at Mozilla, on Firefox browsers, I can guarantee you that none of this is a coincidence.
I have never seen the search contract so I don't think I am breaking any kind of NDA but I have been close enough to engineering and browser planning and product management to know that Google dictates (negotiates?) in great detail every aspect of search in the browser. This is not a simple "you can use Google Search" deal, instead Google is basically the product manager and ux designer for the browser and they spell out in the contract how search works, how the navigation works, what the UX looks like, what is allowed and not allowed in terms of competing search engines. On mobile it goes further than that and they also dictate how the browser integrates with Android features related to search and voice search.
Mozilla can't surive without Google cash and I fully believe they negotiated hard for a good fair deal that puts users and choice first but I am also sure that Google got the better hand and that is why Search in Firefox has been largely "product managed" / micro-managed by Google.
Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this. Other than .. Google probably force a good deal in their advantage? Apple taking more money by allowing less choice, or even being forced to accept a new deal?
Not having a search deal is simply not an option. Mozilla would die. Apple would have to explain billions of revenue loss to shareholders. Both are impossible.
Mozilla changed its default search engine to Yahoo during Marissa Mayer times and Mozilla didn't die -- it probably made more money by doing so. Mozilla could switch its default to Bing if Microsoft paid more.
I don't know why people keep speculating that this would be the ruling.
Paying for default placement is a simple commercial transaction that only becomes problematic when you're already a monopoly and can spend 10% of your billions in revenue to stay on top and keep smaller contenders out. Is there anything in what the judge has said that would suggest that they view the simple act of having a paid default as being anti-competitive in and of itself?
> Apple probably had much more freedom becsuse of their size and power and I don't really understand why it is not possible to add a custom search engine. There is no advantage for Apple to not allow this.
I think you're giving Apple too much credit. They are too myopic and too focused on optimizing their current financials, especially under Tim Cook. To build a new search engine would mean 1) tossing away the $20B Google offers, and 2) spend potentially billions to build or acquire something viable.
Would be unacceptable to the Apple institutional shareholders. Akin to what Meta tried to do with their Reality Labs.
It used to be pretty common for computer-illiterate people to add a bunch of extra search bars and other weird hotbars, often of ill-repute, by accident. Maybe Apple just didn’t want to repeat that.
The status quo in fact encourages going back to the toolbar-infested days of yore. The only way to use a non-bribe-paying search engine in Safari is to install a browser extension with access to every webpage. There are standards that work just fine for switching search engines without any extensions or toolbars but Apple explicitly rejects those standards.
There's no excuse for not making search engine management as simple and flexible as Firefox does, especially on the desktop, but I appreciate the hoops you jump through to keep hacks available for browsers with less user choice.
Even Firefox has its issues - they don't sync search settings along with everything else, and the reason is they're worried about interfering with paid search defaults on new installs.
The last time I checked (this may have changed), Firefox also tags the default search engines with URL query parameters indicating that the search came from Firefox. When I tried to change this it would not let me edit the default URLs. I had to add entirely-new versions of Google and DuckDuckGo, with custom names and stripped-down URLs in order to avoid the tagging.
No doubt it is revenue-related, but it's also a privacy problem.
Your question is assuming they're not already locking down as many of the 50 other ways as possible. Yes there are other bad things but that doesn't mean we should add #51 to that list.
I suppose it tells them you searched with the address/search bar instead of navigating to the search website. But I'm not sure why you would care about that.
Firefox makes you jump through hoops too. To enable the UI for adding custom search engines you need to set the undocumented preference "browser.urlbar.update2.engineAliasRefresh" to true.
This is not really true. The about:config flag you mentioned does add a button in the Settings page allowing the addition of custom search engines, but that's only because the intended method for adding search engines is different. The normal way doesn't require setting anything in about:config, but it might be a little hidden (still found it on my own though, so I dunno).
The regular way is to visit the homepage for the search engine you want to add and click the URL bar. This will show the usual search drop-down with the "This time, search with:" row at the bottom. If you're on the homepage for a search engine which hasn't been added to Firefox, there will be an additional button on that row allowing you to add the site as a search engine, which will make it accessible from the regular settings page like every other search engine.
I meant changing it in Preferences though, and not a drop-down like it used to be. You can add completely new engines, change defaults, and even give them keywords for quick searches without any undocumented change.
That said, keyword searches are awesome and I use them for a whole lot of things, including effectively custom search engines. I have keyword searches against, e.g., internal confluence docs so I only have to enter "con <thing I'm searching for>" and firefox will load the confluence search page, or "people <name>" to bring up our internal phonebook with a search for the employee. I don't think I've ever needed to add my own entirely custom search engine to the browser.
(My impression is that the feature is hidden behind a setting because it's half-baked and not yet ready to replace opensearchdescription xml, add-ons, and bookmark keywords as the official way to add search engines.)
If you were a government party with subpoena power, you'd think the internet was made of tubes. You'd have no idea how tech works, and only rubber stamp things tech companies provide you. Otherwise, you'd be over qualified and too focused on things other than raising money, kissing babies while stealing their lollipops.
To be fair to some of my former colleagues in government, there are some folks who do know about tech in Congress and smattered across federal agencies and the White House. While politicians themselves may not know how the internet works, if they listen to their staffers (which many do on the actual technical part of a topic if not the political or other implications of an issue), they are probably at least somewhat informed.
Kagi on Firefox requires an extension, which is ridiculous. I am about to find a more user friendly browser. Session, bookmarking and history search haven’t seen any meaningful improvement in 15+ years.
Maybe it's changed, but last time I tried to set my Searx instance as a default search provider, it involved rolling my own search provider extension for it.
>2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.
I guess this is so that unrelated extension X can't also change the default search while it's at it, like in the good old IE days, so it kind of sort of makes sense. though if the extension is named after a search engine it should probably get a pass, and the context menu thing obviously is also related to search.
Yes this is exactly right. There is an industry of chrome extensions that exist to change the search engine to something truly unwanted (yahoo search anyone?) so that the extension author can extract rev share. They often advertise the extension as something else to trick people into installing. The target is often kids. As someone who worked at Google, I was surprised / shocked to see how many kids get targeted by these extensions. “Want to play this cool game? Just install this extension.” It is a really problematic thing without an obvious solution. Google has to fight against unwanted extensions but absolutely shouldn’t hide behind that acting like it is okay to punish competing search engines in the process.
Also in case you were curious what tipped me off was seeing just how common it is for Chromebooks to not have Google as their default search engine. Totally not the intended outcome of Google creating Chrome OS.
"It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect."
Reading the early history of Microsoft I once came across a quote from someone that the company intentionally made the possibility of booting different operating systems on the PC difficult by design. What I found interesting is that this was before Linux became popular. They were already contemplating the possibility of booting other operating systems.
Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively." (Hence it should be set as a "default".) Could we imagine Microsoft arguing, "Everyone agrees Windows is the best and that's why they will never want to boot another operating system."
Maybe some relics of this sort of subtle subterfuge live on today. For example, it was historically difficult if not impossible to dual boot Windows along with non-Microsoft OS without allowing Windows to be first in the boot order, e.g., Windows partition must be the first partition. Even in the UEFI era, I see hints that this issue may still persist:
Regardless of whether I have the details exactly right (I used to edit MBRs by hand to set the first active partition and have forgotten much of that knowledge now), the point is that the software/"tech" company tactic of preserving or adding deliberate hassles, i.e., "friction", is an old one. Surely it must work to have persisted for so long.
>Google's argument at trial was something like, "Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively."
Hence the logical question is: why is Google collectively paying billions of dollars to Apple and Mozilla if they are so sure they have the best search engine in the industry? I think they know that they do not have the best search engine possible and they just want to control the whole distribution channel both vertically and horizontally. Imo, long story short; Google is house of cards built of Google Search, Google Chrome and Android and if you take one card out the whole structure would collapse. They came to realize by observing Microsoft that if you control distribution channels, you control the end product and I think their weakest link is Chrome. So anyone who can create better internet browser than Google's Chrome can disrupt Google's dominion over the Web.
> Everyone agrees Google search is the best and that's why they use it exclusively.
What a specious argument. Just because it is the best now[1], doesn't mean it is the best possible, and blocking competition can prevent something that is better from gaining traction.
[1]:which is itself debatable, and I question if any search engine can unilaterally be the best since different engines may be better in different situations
> On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.
Wouldn't this be the fault of Apple as it is Apple that controls the list?
The “make search difficult to change” is more obviously anti trust worthy, and if they did make this deal I would not be surprised if they were careful to not write anything down.
(Not to mention google deleting chats against court orders)
sure, but every change away from that default means having the default is that much less valuable. So it sort of seems like it might make financial sense not devoting dev time to making it easy to switch.
That last part requires a nudge and a wink, just like those OEMs who didn't "need" to make it annoying as fuck to turn off secure boot under the terms of their contract with Microsoft but did it anyway because they knew what was good for them.
If these hypothetically had no impact on the rest of the business, and were just an arbitrary payment, they would be the difference between Google having more profit than Apple, and vice versa.
The deal with Google is not a fixed amount. It has a revenue component (ie a share of Google revenue from that user). So the motivation for Apple to make it difficult is clear - a user switching browser costs Apple money as it does not have revenue share deals with others
Google pays to be the default, not for exclusivity as evidenced by the list of SEs Apple provides to swap to.
I never knew what the hell Apple was doing with the extremely limited set of search engines with the only means to change it being to choose one of the others Apple has included on a static list which cannot be modified by the user.
There is no reporting whatsoever that there is any other payment to be in the list of alternatives. There is no evidence that Microsoft pays Apple to include Bing in the list of alternatives.
So nothing whatsoever like that was revealed in the case.
Dude, given you don't have any evidence to the contrary, the correct response here is "wow, I hadn't heard of that, please tell me more", rather than to assume that if you haven't heard of something, it must be false.
I don't know why there was no reporting of this, but it is what Gabriel Wineberg testified to under oath. See the trial transcripts, 2023-09-21, 1:36pm[0].
> Q. And since this agreement was signed in 2014, DuckDuckGo has been one of the built in options that a user can select as their search engine in Safari, right?
> A. Yes.
> Q. DuckDuckGo agreed, through this service integration agreement, to pay Apple a share of the revenue that DuckDuckGo receives from certain search traffic originating from Safari, right?
> A. Yes.
You see how that is DDG paying for being in the list of alternatives, right? And that it was revealed in this case?
Thanks for that, that's very interesting. And indeed, has had no reporting whatsoever as far as I can tell.
Do you know if Microsoft, Yahoo, and Ecosia also pay for placement? Since those are the other options Safari provides?
You're right, I shouldn't have said it was false -- I thought I'd followed this subject very closely, and this is definitely not common knowledge at all. I stand corrected, thanks.
There is proof (not just evidence) that Google paid to be on the list. There is evidence that to be on that list, one needs to pay; therefore, there is evidence that Microsoft also paid to be there.
We actually know it. I told you how we know it, and you ignored it. If that wasn't enough for you, you could have asked for details rather than scold me about not providing tedious details on something that was public knowledge.
Anyway, I've provided said tedious details in a sibling comment.
I use only Kagi on all my devices. Thank you for building a phenomenal search engine.
On iOS my Safari browser is always in private mode. I never use non-private tabs. Kagi integration via the Safari extension works most of the time - but was broken for several months (required re-logging into Kagi when opening a new private tab after a delay). It looks like you fixed it just a couple of weeks ago, so I appreciate that.
I am raising this just so you are aware of this use case - always staying in private mode.
(The fact that iOS doesn't allow setting the default search provider in Safari to anything other than half a dozen of pre-selected partners is abysmal.)
I use Orion exclusively because Kagi is the default search engine. It does have a few more bugs than chrome / safari, but they're well worth putting up with to get native Kagi support. Thank you.
It's interesting though - what is Apple's vested interest in only having native support for certain search engines? I now no longer use their browser because of this - I would think that is _some_ kind of loss for them. Maybe not, since I'm on macOS anyway.
Under these circumstances, it is appropriate to ask who is the customer. Then presume that the company is trying its best to make the customer happy.
Apple has clearly defined that the customer for the "default search engine selection" option is Google and not the users. There is obviously some mediation by regulators in Europe and elsewhere (hence Google's major competitors being included on the list), but the customer is Google. I think that from that fact flows two further inferences:
A) the customer might not want to write down everything, or even communicate in any non-deniable way, all of their preferences (due to those regulators), but can presume that Apple understands their preferences
B) The customer is happy to the tune of 20 billion dollars with the current set-up.
Even if not explicitly conditioned, which I don't believe came out as being the case in this case, there's still an inherent motivation. Google will pay more for a default on an OS where it's hard to switch the default than it will for a default where it's easy to switch away. Google might pay $20 billion for defaults on iOS as-is where 99% of people stick with Google, but if Apple started asking users if they were sure and offering alternatives and Google only remained the default for half of people, they logically would only offer maybe $10 billion to remain default on the same actual terms.
It seems plausible. Mostly I think people should be explicit and clear about their accusations.
Something that doesn’t make a ton of sense to me in this theory is that, despite it being hard to add a new engine (which is not great), it is easy to switch away from Google on iOS. And the big search engines are in their pre-populated list. So it seems Google and Apple have engaged in a conspiracy to keep people from switching… just to the niche engines? That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
My first guess is that Apple lived through the era of confused non-technical people adding a bunch of scam search engines and didn’t want a repeat of that.
> That doesn’t make a ton of sense, right? Google is probably not more scared of Kagi than Bing.
Google certainly should be more scared of Kagi than Bing. Bing is a known quantity that's not going to suddenly shoot ahead of them. A smaller, newer competitor might. Just like how it wasn't Lycos or Jeeves that dethroned Yahoo, it was the two guys in a garage.
No, I’m supposing that Apple knows they have more control if they obfuscate the ability to switch. And more control is more valuable to Google or whoever else wants to pony up to be the “default”.
This is one of those "a wink is as good as a nod to a blind person" situations so that plausible deniability is maintained while getting the desired results
As long as it’s an ongoing relationship nothing needs to be said. Apple knows that if more users swap away from the default then the default setting is less valuable.
If that is what the (vaguely described) conspiracy is, it doesn’t really make a ton of sense, because the pre-populated list of search engines already includes most of Google’s main competitors.
1. That sounds like an Apple issue, not a Google issue
2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days).
3. I'm not sure what you're talking about, is Chrome on Linux default search configured differently than Chrome on Windows?
>2. That sounds perfectly reasonable. Google doesn't want people to bundle other things for users who want to install just a different default search (and not "your hotbar" like the Netscape days).
I suspect it's the other way around. They don't want random extensions to mess with your search engine because they get kickbacks from yahoo or whatever. Though if the extension is named for a search engine I don't think it should apply.
I did have issues on Linux regarding the extension working in private windows due to the official Firefox extension being out-of-date. Using the latest Github release of their extension fixed it, and they promptly submitted the new update for it to propagate through the extension store after a ticket on their feedback forum asked about it[0].
Github releases with .xpi's to install have been removed[1] which is odd but hopefully they keep up with their Firefox extension submissions if this is the route they're going down.
As for Chrome, I only use it for automated/manual testing since that's what everyone uses.
Lets not kid ourselves. This wasn't a random reviewer giving you a hard time, your extension is definitely being "reviewed" way up the chain in order to find any menial reason to not allow you.
I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Kagi should stop blaming Apple or Google and make your own app already. People love apps and would be very happy to search by opening your app instead of using weird and suspicious hacks.
As a for-profit company you cannot fall back on the comfort of blaming outside factors for your problems. You have the best search engine in the world already, so don't make it so difficult for people to become your (paying) users.
I like your product but find the inability to set it as default very aggravating. Your plugin has improved a lot but it’s still janky. I blame Apple as much as Google. They could choose to align with users but instead they made Safari a profit center with Google’s collusion.
While true, it is also notable that ChatGPT is not a search engine, SearchGPT is not live yet, and that AI results have only further diminished the quality of search results in Google Search.
If anything, OpenAI has only served to further exacerbate and accelerate the inevitable decline of Google Search.
1. On iOS the list of allowed search engines is simply baked into OS, we have a fiddly extension that hooks outbound calls to /search and redirects them but I wish we didn't need to.
2. On Chrome, we use an extension to change the default search engine and enable search auto-complete etc, but Google has a policy that such an extension can do one thing and one thing only, and recently removed our extension on account of that [1]. We rebuilt it to meet their needs but had a lot of back-and-forth because we included 'search by image' on a context menu item and the first reviewer felt that was a bridge too far. You'll note that Chrome provides such a context menu item for Google Image search out of the box.
3. On Chrome for Linux, the default search engine API is not available, so Linux users have to configure it manually through a series of silly steps [2]. This is at least in keeping with most Linux experiences.
There are other issues, but I say all this to highlight how surprisingly difficult it is to change this setting in a practical, consumer friendly way. It is most certainly this difficult by design, that's a lot of revenue to protect.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41028924
2: https://github.com/kagisearch/chrome_extension_basic?tab=rea...