The Google vs U.S. antitrust trial is bringing out tidbits of information that most did not know before. Testimony in the trial revealed that Google spent a total of $26.3 billion in 2021 to be the default search engine in multiple browsers, phones, and platforms.It also gave a tiny glimpse into the value of certain search queries. Now this is only one snapshot for one week of data that came out in the trial.
The Verge gets credit for the reporting here,
The list is only for the week of September 22nd, 2018, and it is the list of top queries ordered by revenue and nothing else. Still, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before, and the list was only made public after long deliberations from Judge Amit Mehta, who has, over the course of the trial, begun to push both sides to be more public with information and data like this.
Okay, here are the top 20 queries for that week ordered by revenue:
- iphone 8
- iphone 8 plus
- auto insurance
- car insurance
- cheap flights
- car insurance quotes
- direct tv
- online colleges
- at&t
- hulu
- iphone
- uber
- spectrum
- comcast
- xfinity
- insurance quotes
- free credit report
- cheap car insurance
- aarp
- lifelock
Someone in the comments pointed out that The iPhone 8 launched the year before, together with iPhone X.
They wrote:
2018 was the year of the iPhone XR/XS.
Weird they weren’t searching for the newest models.
Maybe people were looking for deals, since the iPhone 8 probably had it’s price reduced around this, or maybe people were looking for models that still had Touch ID, to avoid the transition to Face ID as long as they could.
You can read the full story here