Google tells EU court it’s the # 1 search query on Bing

Google is in the midst of one of its many battles with EU antitrust regulators – this time it hopes to overturn the record-breaking $ 5 billion fine the European Commission imposed on it in 2018. The fine was for unfairly pushing Google search on phones running Android software, and Google’s appealing argument is that search aggregation is not the reason it dominates the search market – Google search is so good.

Bloomberg reports the latest set of arguments from Google, with Alphabet’s lawyer Alfonso Lamadrid telling the court: “People use Google because they want to, not because they are forced to. Google’s market share in general search is consistent with consumer surveys showing that 95% of users prefer Google over competing search engines. “

Lamadrid then dropped an incredible burn on Microsoft’s No.2 search engine, Bing: “We have submitted evidence showing that by far the most common search query on Bing is ‘Google’.”

Globally, Statcounter has 92% of Google’s search engine market share, while Bing lags far behind at 2.48%. Bing is the default search engine on most Microsoft products, like the Edge browser and Windows, so quite a few people find themselves there as the path of least resistance. Although this is the default, Google maintains that people cannot leave Bing fast enough and that they perform a browse request to get “Google” free from the Microsoft ecosystem.

Google’s argument that defaults don’t matter flies in the face of other business operations. Google pays Apple billions of dollars every year to remain the default search on iOS, which is an extremely generous thing to do if search defaults don’t matter. Current estimates put Google’s payments to Apple at $ 15 billion per year. Google also pays around $ 400 million a year to Chrome rival Mozilla to remain the default search on Firefox.