14 DAY TRIAL // Google is the most popular search engine, but the company behind the service had to pay huge amounts of money to gain market.
One of the few territories that many would think Google has no intention to conquer is Apple. The Cupertino-based company prefers to offers its customers all services made by its own engineers, and that would indeed include a search service if Apple had one.
The good news for Google is Apple does not seem to have any plans to develop a search service that would be available on its own devices. That's probably the main reason Google convinced Apple the let it use its own search engine on iOS devices.
The search bar and the default search for the iPhone's browser has been Google for a few years now, but no one knows that the search giant had to pay a portion of its revenues to Apple.
According to a new report coming from Bloomberg, Google paid Apple no less than $1 billion so that the former's search engine could remain on iPhone's browser.
Previous rumors claimed that Google had paid Apple to keep its search engine on the iOS platform, but no details on the agreement have been disclosed until today.
34% revenue share changed hands in the last couple of years
It appears that the revenue-sharing agreement revealed in a transcript of court proceedings from Oracle Corp.'s copyright lawsuit against Google, shows the lengths the search giant must go to keep customers using its service on mobile devices.
Since this is more of a partnership, Apple financially benefits from the agreement, even though the Cupertino-based company criticized Google search service in the past for intrusion of privacy.
One of the witnesses in the lawsuit said that “at one point in time the revenue share was 34%,” but it's unclear whether that percentage is the revenue kept by Google or paid to Apple.
As expected, Google objected to the information being disclosed to the public and attempted to have the judge strike the mention of the 34% revenue share, but magistrate judge refused the company's request to block sensitive information from the public.