Default settings don’t drive search engine queries

Earlier this week, a federal court ruled that Google maintains a monopoly in general search services through its exclusive distribution agreements which make it the default search engine on certain hardware and web browsers. A major portion of the court’s argument is that defaults effectively determine user behavior and that Google leverages this to trap users on Google and block competition.

But the federal court appears to have reached this conclusion in part based on a singular piece of evidence, and a more comprehensive evaluation of data reveals the faulty reasoning in the court’s decision. 

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., cited evidence that 80% of users on Edge, Microsoft’s marquee web browser, use Bing, Microsoft’s default search engine on Edge, for search services. The ruling dismissed the argument that these users are simply loyal to Microsoft products and concluded, “Bing’s uniquely high search share on Edge cannot be explained by that (loyalty) alone. The default on Edge drives queries to Bing.”  The federal court uses this to extrapolate that users rarely ever change default settings.  

This notion could stem from non-scientific research on Microsoft Word in 2011, which showed that roughly 95% of users never changed the default settings. The survey sample was not carefully selected to ensure it matched the population it was trying to study, meaning it could have contained a disproportionately high number of digitally illiterate users who are less likely to be comfortable changing settings. It makes sense that a majority of non-technically oriented users would stick with default settings, but it’s far from conclusive evidence that default settings are never altered, especially considering the data are from 2011. However, there are no scientifically conducted studies showing that users stick to default settings, especially at a rate as high as 80%.  

In 2021, in another non-scientific internet survey of roughly 4,500 Android users, when asked how important Android’s customization features are to them, only 5% responded that the default options are always right, compared to the 90% who indicated they make changes to default settings. Again, this sample may not be trustworthy because the sample being asked could contain a high ratio of digitally literate users who are more likely to “tinker” with their devices. While this also is not conclusive scientific evidence, at a minimum it should raise questions about the federal court’s claim users don’t change default settings.  

Edge users are far from trapped by the default search engine setting. They can simply look for other search services like Google, and they do so in staggering volume. In a report from 2021, keyword data showed that the number one search on Bing was “Google” at roughly 40 million queries per month. This translates into roughly 480 million annual Edge queries that escape the “default” settings they are apparently trapped in.     

People who use Edge likely prefer Microsoft products and might enjoy the convenience of Bing being the default. Since Google is so dominant, it’s even more likely that non-Google users intentionally chose another product. But defaults don’t take away that choice, and even forcing choice onto users won’t change the fact that users can already choose what search services they want. 

Luckily for the court, a natural experiment is already occurring in Europe, where antitrust regulators have made out-of-the-box defaults illegal, forcing a “choice screen” of search services onto users when they start their devices for the first time. Google isn’t even allowed to be listed at the top of that screen (users have to scroll to find it).  However, since the implementation of the choice screen in 2022, Google’s market share in the European Union remains unchanged at roughly 90%. This means that, similar to Bing users, a strong majority of customers went out of their way to use Google, indicating that they understood the differences between search services and voluntarily chose Google even though it wasn’t the default. 

The federal court even undermines its argument about defaults later in the decision, claiming that defaults are “weaker when the product is of poor quality” and even explicitly says, “Google’s strong product quality… likely weakened the effectiveness of defaults on Windows.”

They continue by acknowledging that “Google significantly outperforms rivals” and that “Google’s superior product quality rests in part on its numerous innovations over the years.”  This seems to directly contradict the claim that defaults drive queries, instead showing that users can detect search quality and are willing to make changes based on that perception. 

If the federal court’s theory about defaults is correct, Microsoft should be able to leverage its worldwide hardware advantage to gain a higher market share for Edge and Bing. But that hasn’t happened because, by the court’s admission, Bing lacks the quality and innovations that Google has been making since 2009. This should force the court to re-evaluate its claim about the “power” of defaults and acknowledge that users are more educated, complex, and willing to make changes than they assume. Just because 80% of Edge users, who are a small minority in the browser market, choose to use the associated default search product does not definitively prove that defaults drive queries. Product quality is arguably a bigger factor in search service choice than defaults.  

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