This is something that I’ve been wondering about for a while and when a friend brought it up to me I thought I would do some research. I use both almost everyday and I was confused by how you could open Safari, search something and then be in Google. Turns out that’s because Safari and Google are two completely different things. Safari is a web browser, that’s the app you use to get to the internet. Think of it like the window you look through to see the web. It’s made by Apple and comes pre-installed on all your Apple devices. Google, on the other hand, is a search engine. It’s the tool you use to find stuff on the internet. You can use Google inside Safari, just like you can use it in Chrome (which, by the way, is Google’s own browser). Because of the fact that you can Google things in Safari, it feels like they’re the same thing. But they’re not.
Now, there’s more to it than that, especially when it comes to your data. Safari, being made by Apple, has a reputation for being more privacy-focused. It blocks some tracking cookies automatically and tries to limit how many websites can follow you around online.
Google, however, makes its money from ads, and ads need data. Every search you make, every link you click, feeds into the giant system that powers Google’s recommendations and personalized ads. That’s why you might search for rain boots once and then see ads for them for the rest of the month.
Google and Apple have been fighting over control of the internet basically since Safari and Google were invented. But here the difference between them: Neither is necessarily better or worse, it depends on what matters to you. If you’re more concerned about privacy then you could go with Safari because it has a few more protections built in. If you want very specific and accurate search result and don’t mind your data being shared then I would go for Google.
So, the difference between Google and Safari is that Safari is what you use to get on the Internet, and Google is the filter that you use to find stuff once you’re there. Both are useful and both are very aligned with their companies values.