Inside Google’s plan to stop Apple’s Spotlight
Battle over search engines about to escalate on iPhones
For years, Google watched with increasing concern as Apple improved its search technology, not knowing whether its longtime partner and sometimes competitor would eventually build its own search engine.
Those fears ratcheted up in 2021, when Google paid Apple around $18 billion to keep Google’s search engine the default selection on iPhones, according to two people with knowledge of the partnership, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. That same year, Apple’s iPhone search tool, Spotlight, began showing users richer web results like those they could have found on Google.
Google quietly planned to put a lid on Apple’s search ambitions. The company looked for ways to undercut Spotlight by producing its own version for iPhones and to persuade more iPhone users to use Google’s Chrome web browser instead of Apple’s Safari browser, according to internal Google documents reviewed by The New York Times. At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.
Google’s anti-Apple plan illustrated the importance that its executives placed on maintaining dominance in the search business. It also provides insight into the company’s complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google’s mobile ads business for more than a decade.
The relationship has come under scrutiny in the landmark antitrust suit brought against Google by the Justice Department and dozens of states. Lawyers for the government have argued that Google rigged the market in its favor with default agreements signed with companies including Apple, Samsung and Mozilla. These pacts funnel traffic to Google’s search engine when users look up information in the top bar of a browser.
Google is expected to begin a three-week presentation of its defense in the lawsuit’s monthslong trial Thursday. So far, the company has downplayed the role that its default agreements with phone makers and browser companies has had on its success. It argues that its search engine is popular because of its quality and innovation, and that users can easily choose another default in their device settings.
But the documents viewed by the Times showed that Google understood the power of defaults in channeling users to a product as it tried to change Apple’s selection of Safari as the iPhone’s default web browser.
“Competition in the tech industry is fierce, and we compete against Apple on many fronts,” said Peter Schottenfels, a Google spokesperson. “There are more ways than ever to search for in