Google to pay $1 billion to Apple for default search privilege

You might think that considering they individually own the rights to the two most competing smartphone operating systems in the world, Google and Apple would be at each other's throats and never likely to do business. In reality however that's far from the case. Back in 2009, Google paid $82 (£53) million to Apple in order for Google to be the default search engine on iOS. This year, the same deal is expected to cost the search giant $1 billion (£640 million).

This is a huge amount of money that even a company like Apple with several billion already banked away, would find hard to turn down. It may be money that soon heads in Samsung's direction though, since it has become the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the last year.

While Apple is making a profit however,what's in it for Google? As Techcrunch points out, it doesn't even make back that billion on advertising to Apple users. In-fact the real money maker for Google with the deal is the user data that it is able to gather up thanks to the searchers.

Microsoft has attempted to push its own search engine out there, but has only managed to secure partnerships with the fallen from grace Nokia and Blackberry, who now use Bing as their default search.

KitGuru Says: It seems so odd that you have to pay for someone to use your service. Especially when it's something like Google, which is by far the most popular search engine in the world and has been for a long, long time.

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