Witness Testifies that Google’s Search Defaults Exploit Human Tendency to Stick to Habits

Antonio Rangel, a professor of behavioral economics at the California Institute of Technology, possesses the knowledge to influence consumers into selecting a cereal box from a supermarket shelf through product placement and understanding their habits. He also claims that Google, being aware of these tactics, has vigorously defended its position as the default search engine on mobile phones.

“If I can move your eyes, if I can manipulate your fixations, I can pretty much manipulate your choices,” Rangel said as an expert witness called by the US government in a landmark antitrust trial against Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Rangel said in a statement Wednesday and Thursday that his research on the placement of cereal boxes in stores was relevant to his assessment of search engine defaults. He found that getting a prominent property on a web browser or mobile phone prevents people from switching to competing search engines. Consumers are reluctant to change ingrained behavior, he said.

“Search engine defaults place a significant and robust weight on default,” Rangel said. “Default values have a powerful influence on consumer decisions.” Often, consumers don’t even realize they’re making a default choice and don’t know how to change it, he said.

Rangel’s testimony will address a key point in the government’s largest technology monopoly trial in two decades, which opened Tuesday in Washington. The U.S. Department of Justice alleges that Google illegally maintains a monopoly on web search by paying more than $10 billion a year to technology rivals, smartphone makers and wireless service providers in exchange for making it the pre-selected or default option on mobile phones and web browsers. . Google claims that the company has won market share because it has the best search engine, not because of a lack of competition.

The trial, which is expected to last 10 weeks, could have far-reaching consequences for the $1.7 trillion company, which has revolutionized communication and information retrieval in the modern Internet age. At this stage of the trial, the Justice Department is trying to establish that Google broke the law; if District Judge Amit Mehta so decides, he may seek another proceeding that would include remedies. The government could call for the largest forced breakup of a U.S. company since AT&T was dissolved in 1984, freeing Google Search from its other businesses, such as Maps or its Android operating software.

Rangel testified that Google demonstrated by its actions that it believes in the power of default settings. Google employs a Behavioral Economics team that conducted experiments with the company’s products to see how it would affect the behavior of people who use them, he said.

In one, advertisers looking to spend money on Google were asked to enter a maximum daily budget in an interface with no default settings. The team tested adding a default value of $10 to increase spending by low-budget advertisers — and it worked, Rangel said. The new default brought Google “hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue,” he said.

Google has also felt the power of defaults on the losing end. Employees working on the development of Google Podcasts complained internally about how the defaults hindered the product’s adoption. A Google employee said in the email cited by Rangel that while the team felt it offered “an equivalent or better user experience,” Apple Podcasts has a significant advantage because the app is included on iPhones. “This shows the power of assumption,” a Google employee said.

Time and time again, Google worked to remain the default search engine on mobile devices and browsers, Rangel said. In 2007, Google’s chief economist Hal Varian called the default homepage “a powerful strategic weapon in the search battle.” In 2014, Google noted that Android users “rarely stray from preloaded apps. And in 2015, Google described as a “code red” the loss of an agreement with Apple to keep it as the default search engine in Safari browsers.

“Our brand is well-positioned among iPhone users, but our position is still very vulnerable if the default settings change,” one Google employee said in the email cited by Rangel.

Rangel also noted that search engine defaults are stronger on mobile devices than on PCs due to their size and user interface.

In 2012, Apple changed the iPhone’s default mapping setting from Google Maps to its own new product, Apple Maps. Rangel said the impact of the switch was “immediate, very large and lasting quite a long time.” The exact figures have been removed from the public domain.

Apple Maps became the dominant mapping app on the iPhone despite its quality issues, he said.

In another case in 2020, privacy-focused browser Brave Software Inc. changed its default search engine to DuckDuckGo in four countries: Germany, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The company found a “significant number” of users left DuckDuckGo because of the switch, Rangel said.

Google argued in its defense that the superior quality of the products is the most important.

When Google attorney John Schmidtlein asked Rangel if the default bias outweighed the superior product, Rangel gave a nuanced answer. “It’s going to depend on the consumer’s intelligence and other experiences,” he said. “All other things being equal, if they’re not satisfied with the searches, they’re more likely to move into an explicit mode” to switch to another product or browser.

Schmidtlein then asked if Rangel agreed that companies typically use consumer demand as a proxy for consumer preferences.

“I think companies are looking to maximize profits and use consumer demand to build models of what consumers would do,” Rangel said. “And that’s not the same thing as preferences.”