I would love to see search get back to what it’s meant to be: information retrieval. Help users find what they’re looking for, not what Google wants them to find.
Although what would Apple's model be? Have it as a sort-of loss-leader, a bit like their OS is effectively a loss leader for their hardware sales? That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
Is more of the cost burden on creating and maintaining the index or serving queries? Is it possible that serving queries to everyone would be worth it just to build the brand?
Arguably, and this would be an antitrust concern, IMHO, but they could serve ads... but only to non-Apple devices.
This is not a new idea - it was pretty much Google's original mission statement, ISTR.
Seems reasonable!
> That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
People performing actual searches has to be one of the lower cost factors of creating a search engine, at least for a long time. Unless it completely explodes, which I find very doubtful considering Googles position, and also considering Apples deep pockets, I don't think Apple will be in a big hurry to shut the gates. Additionally I can totally see Apple doing heavy integration with it's systems and actually using this potential search engine to upsell people into their ecosystem.
I could see them coming up with some sort of privacy friendly ad targeting system using on-device matching or differential privacy.
So they solve the privacy problem but there will still be ads (unless you buy their "Apple Ad Free Experience" service for $10 per month)
It's quite possible that DOJ antitrust action would prevent Google from paying to be a preferred search engine in the future. Once Google isn't paying you, why not provide your own search engine (and cut Google off from that valuable data stream)?
I'm unsure as to whether they would seriously create a new ad platform, but a key tenant of the company's culture is not relying on advertising for revenue.
Apple made over a quarter trillion dollars in profits in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income...), and gets somewhere around $10B from Google. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/apple-services-success-story...)
They can certainly afford to ditch the partnership.
I dislike Apple. I'll never buy Apple. But Apple might just create the best search engine there is, with the right incentives.
iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Maps, for instance, are all accessible from the web.
1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported. But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand.
2) And financially, they'd trade their incredibly lucrative deal with Google for such a high risk? It just doesn't seem like something a board would approve.
3) The timing of this feels very suspicious, though maybe that's just sudden journalist interest rather than leaks... but if you were Google, this is the best thing that could happen to you lawsuit-wise. Can't you imagine a conversation one or two years ago? "Hey Apple, OK we'll pay you the $8-12 billion, but you also have to spend a little chunk of it -- just $10 million, really -- to credibly claim you're 'developing' your own search engine. Don't ever deliver it, just always be 'working' on it. Cool? Awesome, thanks."
2# Search is one of THE primary usage of the device, they have enough throwaway money to take this on. Just like Maps.
3# Sounds suspicious. But anti trust discussion started few years back and if you look through those optics EVERYTHING will look suspicious this year. There is no non-suspicious time for one of biggest companies in the world/human history to compete with each other.
The main cost of search is developing incredibly sophisticated ML algorithms for parsing search queries, for ranking results, and parsing web pages to provide factual results (like Google's snippets and knowledge base items).
And this is orders of magnitude more expensive than it was two decades ago. Because you've got to compete with Google which has a 20-year head start in throwing the best engineers in the world at these problems.
Nobody's going to use a search engine that isn't at least 90% as good as Google in these things. See: Bing.
They could also use ads, just in a more subtle and privacy friendly way like the search ads (https://searchads.apple.com/ or previously iAd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd) in the App store already.
Apple's recent testimony before the House revealed that they have already spent Billions of dollars developing Apple Maps.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tech-antitrust/u-s-te...
What happens if the Justice Department finds Google has a monopoly, and somehow decides that Apple can't use Google's Search Engine anymore? I mean, it's a bit of a long shot and a weird idea, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. Google could get themselves into all kinds of trouble in this investigation.
If you're Apple, investing a few tens of millions now so that you have a half-decent search engine ready in case Google goes away is a smart investment. And if nothing happens, you quietly shelve the project.
I don't think it would happen like that. What might happen is that Apple users would be presented with the choice of what search engine they want to use.
It's like that on Android except Google Search and Chrome are already installed and the default, but you're presented with a choice of other search engines and browsers (might be a EU thing though).
They have ads in the App Store already. Search ads are probably the one kind of ad they could make work, since you can sell keywords without tracking and profiling your users.
Not necessarily. Firstly, you might not want to search the whole internet anyway, given how much clickbait spam, link farms, blackhat SEO, and whatnot there is now, thanks to the damage the advertising-driven search model has done to the internet. And secondly, there are alternative search funding models, e.g. subscription fee or listing fee. FWIW, that's the premise behind my side project - search just the good stuff, with no direct adverts, and result pages which contain adverts clearly flagged and heavily downranked.
A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run
That doesn't mean the Search product category is inherently expensive; it means Google has more money than it knows what to do with.
Apple is not very good at its cloud offerings. Never had been.
Does it go down once in a while? Yeah, but so does GCP every now and then.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
Apple is a consumer focused company.
If Apple builds a modestly successful search engine for their iOS platform, it's going to hurt Duck's absolute growth potential. It'd be better for everyone if they just buy them and ride + improve existing momentum.
A few examples from my own personal experience:
- A small beach town in New Zealand shows about 10 streets which have never existed, and tries to route you down them. I did some research, and they were paper roads for a planned development ~20 years ago, but were removed from government records ~15 years ago. Google still seem to be using 15+ year old data, and both myself and the local government have failed to get it corrected.
- Trying to get from the train station to my Airbnb in an Austrian city, Google's walking directions tried to send me through somebody's back yard. It wouldn't offer any other option, so I switched to Apple Maps which correctly routed me.
- A bridge near my apartment in Germany right now is closed to cars for a few months. Bicycles and pedestrians can still use it. Google Maps' walking and cycling directions route around it, Apple correctly sends you over it in walking/cycling modes, but routes around it in driving mode.
Entirely anecdotal of course, but I'm yet to experience an issue like this in the other direction, aside from the very early days of Apple Maps before they acquired TomTom's data.
I get the impression that outside of the US (where they maintain their own data), Google just hoovers up whatever open data it can find on the web, without any regard to its age or accuracy.
Comparing Google, Apple, and Amazon, all three have: smart home products, email services, music services, video conferencing, fitness trackers, phones, tablets, ad networks, app stores, a web browser, and some kind of prominent search engine (products, apps, or web).
Next up: I expect Apple to launch (or buy) a cloud computing backend.
Seems like it would make more sense for Apple to build their own Bing wrapper, team up with Microsoft, or build their own search engine from scratch.
2015: https://searchengineland.com/apple-confirms-their-web-crawle...
It would be nice to have a more private search engine but with Apple's track record of building web services I'm not so optimistic.
Google makes money by building a profile on every internet user and then uses those profiles to target advertisement.
Can Apple do something similar? Apple not so long ago offered iAd:
>Despite massive size and overwhelming popularity, Apple has struggled to court Madison Avenue's influential media buyers, the people at advertising agencies who decide where to spend the budgets of the world's biggest brands.
According to a new report form Ad Age's Kate Kaye, this issue is due in large part to the company's refusal to share valuable consumer data with its advertising partners, meaning that brands are not able to pinpoint prospective customers with nearly the same precision as they can advertising with Facebook and Google.
Here's how Kaye said one executive described Apple's decision not to provide information about individual consumers to its advertising partners on the iAd network, which sells in-app ads on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices:
"One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-people-think-apples-ad-17...
Off the top of my head: (1) the reputational cost of marketing privacy but partnering with google on search; (2) the strategic benefit of pulling some portion of iPhone web traffic away from google...
More likely the search engine would give Apple a reason to collect more user data. It isn't like a significant number of people pick Apple because of privacy and they know it. The main reason they don't collect anything now is because it isn't worth it, but with a search engine it would be.
The main reason the don't collect anything now is because they are a Hardware Platform company. They make much more than google, without any data collection.
If they wanted to do data collection, they wouldn't harp about not collecting data so long. They would have kept mum.
Apple could try to make a lot more money off of their iOS platform right now by becoming very aggressive at abusing privacy. They don't do it because the already lucrative path they've chosen gives them a big competitive advantage in the age of privacy violation.
If Google were a thinner organization instead of a hugely bloated monster conglomerate, and if they ran advertising with weak targeting, they would be a very profitable, very large company at a far lower sales level. That wasn't ambitious enough for Google.
Google's privacy abusing margin is Apple or Duck's opportunity.
Chrome, the browser installed in billions of devices. On Android it comes installed default, on desktop using gmail, youtube will prompt to install chrome (even using MSFT Edge which is chromium based, will prompt to install chrome)
Chrome drives traffic to Google.com as the default search engine.
The search engine is more like an ad engine since most of the above fold content is ads.
Google’s actions say their motto is “Google ads on every page, on every device”
A search engine that doesn’t optimize for ads would be a great boon for humanity.
(the previous thread for the changes to Applebot).
It is something I have wondered about for a long time, I am curious how they would handle it from a financial standpoint.
If they made it privacy focused, maybe no ads (probably a big maybe), and allowed anyone to use it (not just iOS). Could Apple search become the gateway to buying other Apple products like Google search has become for Google?
Plus any of the other benefits of building this (like improved Siri).
Leveraged properly all the OS level use from iOS could provide a lot of signal on which to build a search product.
If only Apple’s was able to do so for speech recognition.
If they are really privacy conscious, this would be the way to go.