Apple building search engine to take on Google, report claims

Previous thread here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24290613" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24290613</a>

I would love to see Apple build a search engine just as a feature for their products rather than something to stuff to the gills with advertising and make money from. That would completely change the incentive structure. Apple would be much better positioned to make search better for users instead of the conflict of interest Google has (redirecting users toward ads).<p>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.

So many things about this don&#x27;t make sense.<p>1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can&#x27;t do it for free. It&#x27;s going to <i>have</i> to be ad-supported. But ads are the very opposite of Apple&#x27;s brand.<p>2) And financially, they&#x27;d trade their incredibly lucrative deal with Google for such a high risk? It just doesn&#x27;t seem like something a board would approve.<p>3) The timing of this feels very suspicious, though maybe that&#x27;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&#x27;t you imagine a conversation one or two years ago? &quot;Hey Apple, OK we&#x27;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&#x27;re &#x27;developing&#x27; your own search engine. Don&#x27;t ever deliver it, just always be &#x27;working&#x27; on it. Cool? Awesome, thanks.&quot;

I wrote this week about how all tech companies are becoming conglomerates that compete with each other in an oligopoly [1]. This is a great example of that. Every big tech company seems to clone successful units of other tech companies. Over time, every big tech company becomes less distinguishable from its peers.<p>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).<p>Next up: I expect Apple to launch (or buy) a cloud computing backend.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinker.fyi&#x2F;6-break-up-tech-conglomerates&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tinker.fyi&#x2F;6-break-up-tech-conglomerates&#x2F;</a>

Apple already has search built into Spotlight and Siri. It just isn’t attacking the same search problems as Google. It is possible that Apple is building all of this to make Siri smarter. Right now Google has a strategic advantage with “ok Google” vs “hey Siri”. Improving Apple’s knowledge of the web could simply be a move to improve their existing products. They might not have any interest in competing with Google on searching the web and displaying results and ads.

I would rather that fund&#x2F;support&#x2F;use DDG than to their another rose in their garden.

I’d be more surprised if they weren’t ready for the time when Google stops paying to be the default search engine. Can&#x27;t wait to see a &quot;choose your search engine&quot; screen on setup of new phones.

Ending single-search domination is good. Lets see if they can actually come up with a good search engine. I love DDG but I have to search Google usually when I&#x27;m looking for obscure technical issues. Bing and Yahoo (DDG) havn&#x27;t made a dent, lets see what happens.

This comes up every few years, especially with facts like them owning siri.com and running the AppleBot crawler already.<p>2015: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;apple-confirms-their-web-crawler-applebot-220423" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;searchengineland.com&#x2F;apple-confirms-their-web-crawle...</a><p>It would be nice to have a more private search engine but with Apple&#x27;s track record of building web services I&#x27;m not so optimistic.

It will be to other search engines as Ping was to social networks.<p>Apple is not very good at its cloud offerings. Never had been.

Competition against Google is always welcome but this will conceivably only work in Safari on Apple devices and require a service subscription.

Google is a trillion dollar company based on 3 very important products.<p>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)<p>Chrome drives traffic to Google.com as the default search engine.<p>The search engine is more like an ad engine since most of the above fold content is ads.<p>Google’s actions say their motto is “Google ads on every page, on every device”<p>A search engine that doesn’t optimize for ads would be a great boon for humanity.

They must already have some sort of index to power siri web search. I hope they find some space for disruption and create enough differenciation because I’m not sure at all that people value privacy enough to switch

If it works as bad as Siri or iOS keyboard suggestions, I don&#x27;t think Google has anything to worry about.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24338152" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=24338152</a><p>(the previous thread for the changes to Applebot).

This topic seems to come up every couple of years for Apple. But I guess there is actually some evidence for it now.<p>It is something I have wondered about for a long time, I am curious how they would handle it from a financial standpoint.<p>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?<p>Plus any of the other benefits of building this (like improved Siri).

So if Apple give up on Google - how can they replace the revenue Google gives Apple?<p>Google makes money by building a profile on every internet user and then uses those profiles to target advertisement.<p>Can Apple do something similar? Apple not so long ago offered iAd:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IAd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;IAd</a>

For this to make sense, they would have to believe that the value of having their own search engine is greater than the cost of developing it AND the billions they currently receive from Google <i>every year</i> for making google the default search engine. Either that, or it’s a feint to undercut the recently announced US case against google.

You see the early versions of this effort every time you use the safari address bar. “Siri” will suggest a matching Wikipedia article or other direct link instead of you heading to google.<p>Leveraged properly all the OS level use from iOS could provide a lot of signal on which to build a search product.<p>If only Apple’s was able to do so for speech recognition.

Apple will probably just charge users for the search engine by bundling it with its Apple One subscription service. Calling it now, 15 years from now Apple&#x27;s paid search engine will make it so using a search engine with advertising on it will be the socioeconomic equivalent of the green sms bubbles.

Well after new browser from Microsoft, I am using Bing. Google losts its charm when they cannot sort data by date. You cannot use Google to retreive old news, everything is unsorted based on keywords. Most of the time you get same article in different pages.

What is the incentive for that? Apple driving ads through the search engine will not be a good look for them. They would be losing the billions coming from google too. This seems more like some reporter running with Scott galloway’s prediction and making up a story rather than tea reporting.

I wonder why there are no specialised, vertical search engines? One for developers, another for local stuff, yet another for products. Some sites are strong enough to work as such - SO for devs, Yelp for local, Amazon for products - but that only leads to problems in a long term.

It definitely is good for consumers. Similar to Apple maps it might not be better than the Google offering but it&#x27;ll light up a fire up both companies butts to compete for a better product

The massive resources and commitment of Microsoft gave us Bing. Building a search engine is incredibly hard. I’m not buying this, there’s no reason for Apple to start a me-too project

As many things Apple does, I think this will not work well world wide. As it is the case of DDG. In my country, Google Maps and Google Search blow everything away.

This almost seems like a PG submarine [0] article. Especially now, it would benefit Google to be able to point to viable competitors. Maybe I am being too skeptical though.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;submarine.html</a>

Too bad there&#x27;s no money in a search engine that returns results based on exactly what&#x27;s asked for, one that uses boolean operators and respects limiters. Yet, the loss-leader idea for Apple would give them an opening to offer exactly that. One can dream.

If Google pays Apple 10b to be a default search engine, it should profit at least 2x-3x from that positioning. I beleive the real number is in the ballpark of 5x. Going after that pile of dough looks quite reasonable for otherwise stagnant Apple.

I don&#x27;t doubt this, Siri search is already a voice based search engine by Apple. It would be awesome if we get a privacy first, high quality search engine as an alternative to Google.com

Hopefully better attempt than Siri and Apple Maps.

&gt; An Apple search engine would almost certainly have one massive selling point: increased user privacy.<p>More likely the search engine would give Apple a reason to collect more user data. It isn&#x27;t like a significant number of people pick Apple because of privacy and they know it. The main reason they don&#x27;t collect anything now is because it isn&#x27;t worth it, but with a search engine it would be.

Why not just help make DuckDuckGo better?<p>If they are really privacy conscious, this would be the way to go.

Was the Amazon&#x2F;IMDB coming-together called an &quot;acquisition&quot;? Can that model be copied for Apple &amp; DuckDuckGo?

Why not buy DuckDuckGo?

I really can&#x27;t see this happening, and if its does, I can&#x27;t see it working.

Unfortunately it’ll be about as good as Siri and Maps.

Please!!

Can&#x27;t they just buy DuckDuckGo?

i would rather like to see apple buying DDG (duck duck go) instead of diving straight in. The flip side is DDG becoming next Siri :(

I think there are definitely some tremors in this space. I feel like we could see some action further on? what do others think?