I think his point was that his parents don't just use the search field -- they use google. That is, they'll search for google and then they'll search for what they want. If google ever quits paying apple, this is the bet they'll be making. Who knows if they're right.
This. I remember a phone call a while ago. My mother had taken her iPad to a hotel and "the Internet wasn't working."
I spent 5 minutes trying to get her to identify which is the url bar and which is the search bar in Safari. In the end I gave up. My mother is smart.. i swear.. she just somehow doesn't get this.
If she does accidentally use the search box it is to find Google which she almost certainly doesn't realise she is already using.
Really this is my point. Parents are deeply non-tech and it is ingrained in them to use Google whether it is the default search engine or not. I am a bit techy and I always switch the default search engine to Google.
Google paying this money doesn't do anything for my household or my parents. Between our two houses we have 5 iOS devices which are unaffected by this move. It is a tiny number but it makes me wonder how many more people are like this.
One of my favorite "easter eggs" with Yahoo search (at least on search.yahoo.com) was that until recently, if you searched for Google, it would display a second Yahoo search box in the results with a text re-iterating that you could search the web via Yahoo to try to capture these types of users.
(These days it gives a "Search the web with Google" box, and the same if you search for Bing or Yahoo itself).
