DuckDuckGo calls Google’s Android auction fundamentally flawed after losing to Bing

DuckDuckGo lost out to Microsoft’s Bing after they outbid the former in Google’s quarterly auction. Google holds an auction every quarter for four other search engines to appear on an Android device bought in the EU.

In a blog, DuckDuckGo wrote that the EU antitrust remedy is only serving to further strengthen Google’s dominance in mobile search by “boxing out” alternate search engine options that customers want. (DuckDuckGo)

Google's latest default search engine auction saw Microsoft's Bing beating DuckDuckGo to become one of the options to be offered to Android users during setup in select European countries. DuckDuckGo was the most frequently offered alternative so far and wasn't pleased at the loss. This lead to the company slamming Google's auction process as “pay-to-play”.

In a blog, DuckDuckGo wrote that the EU antitrust remedy is only serving to further strengthen Google's dominance in mobile search by “boxing out” alternate search engine options that customers want. The search engines that won are taking most of their profits from the preference menu, DuckDuckGo wrote, adding that the auction model was “fundamentally flawed” and needed to be replaced.

These auctions Google holds every quarter are a direct result of the 2018 European Union antitrust ruling which fined the company a whopping $5 billion (4.3 billion euros) when they found out that Google was illegally tying the Chrome browser and Google Search tools to the Android OS in various ways.

Post that, Google started displaying four search engine options randomly on a per-device basis. And what these four search engines are going to be depends on the companies bidding against each other for a right to appear on the list based on how much they are willing to pay Google each time a user picks their platform.

The last auction results were for March this year and the new one, for October to December, saw Bing beat DuckDuckGo.

The latest auction saw Bing win 13 countries, DuckDuckGo in eight, Info.com in 31, GMX in 16, PrivacyWall in 22 and Yandex in eight.

DuckDuckgo failed to win in more than eight countries despite winning big in the past auctions and they criticised the process calling in an inherently unfair ploy to appease EU regulators and not a legitimate way to increase search engine competition.

DuckDuckGo said it was priced out of the auction because they choose to not maximise their profits by exploiting users. This means that they make less money per search and is thus unable to bid as much as the other search engines in the auction.

The blog post states that the auction format incentivises bidders to bid what they can expect to make per user selection. Long-term results of this mean that most of the search engines taking part in the auction must give most of their preference menu profits to Google.

Google's auction also incentivises search engines to be “worse on privacy” to increase ads and not to donate to good causes because “if they do those things, then they could afford to bid higher”, the blog alleges.