Apple Exec Defends Google Search: ‘It Was the Best’

Eddy Cue, senior vice president of services at Apple, took the stand on Tuesday to explain why Google is Apple’s default search engine for its iPhones and Macs: There wasn’t a “valid alternative.” 

In the US v. Google antitrust trial currently underway, the Justice Department claims that Google illegally suffocates competition to dominate the market. The DOJ points to Google’s multi-billion dollar deals with Apple, LG, Motorola and Samsung for default search engine status on their gadgets—but Cue says that Apple went with Google because there wasn’t “anybody as good.”

“I always felt like it was in Google’s best interest, and our best interest, to get a deal done,” Cue said, adding that Apple has never seriously worked on its own version of Google Search or thought about switching to another default search engine. Google still doesn’t have a comparable alternative, according to Cue. 

The DOJ focused on whether Apple and other companies picked Google because it would be the most profitable choice or because it was truly the best option. 

“We make Google be the default search engine,” Cue said, “because we’ve always thought it was the best. We pick the best one and let users easily change it.” 

Cue’s testimony supports Google’s stance at this trial, which is that its search engine is simply better than its rivals' and the higher quality of its product has led to widespread adoption. The question remains why Google would have to pay other companies for default search status if its product speaks for itself.

The founder of competing search engine DuckDuckGo took a different stance earlier in the trial proceedings, stating that his company couldn’t compete with Google because of its expensive deals with Apple and other companies. DuckDuckGo currently has 2.5% of the search market, but is profitable. 

Google has 91% of the search engine market share and billions of users. When Google had a five-minute outage in 2013, Internet traffic worldwide dropped by 40%. A brief outage in 2022 led to reports from more than 40,000 people that the Search and Maps were down.