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Apple Technology

Apple is Stepping Up Efforts To Build Google Search Alternative (ft.com) 53

Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes to secure prime placement of its engine on the iPhone, Financial Times reported Wednesday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: In a little-noticed change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has begun to show its own search results and link directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen. That web search capability marks an important advance in Apple's in-house development and could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, according to several people in the industry. The Silicon Valley company is notoriously secretive about its internal projects, but the move adds to growing evidence that it is working to build a rival to Google's search engine. Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google's head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world's most popular search engine. The company's growing in-house search capability gives it an alternative if regulators block its lucrative partnership with Google. When the US Department of Justice launched a case last week, over payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone's default search tool, urgency was added to the initiative.
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Apple is Stepping Up Efforts To Build Google Search Alternative More

Apple is Stepping Up Efforts To Build Google Search Alternative

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  • Seems like it should be possible, but... (Score:4)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @12:09PM (#60658554)

    It doesn't seem like what Google is doing, should be impossible to replicate.

    However Bing has had quite a few years and Microsoft throwing hoards of resources at it, and they still cannot seem to match the search quality of Google...

    Maybe it's that Google has better language processing for queries and to find results that relate to that query? Maybe it's that Google just has more people clicking on links so they have a way better idea what is relevant for common terms?

    I wish Apple luck, maybe they have a better approach going than Microsoft has had... I would dearly love to see a real competitor in the search space.

    • Right. various knights tilted at google and haven't pulled it off. Yahoo, bing, duck-duck-go, dogpile and even Mathematica.

      But it's not informationve to just say well because people haven't done it better it can't be done better.

      The informative question is to ask why they aren't succeeding?
      My guess is that it can't be just a pure play on webscraping and search ranking. That should be possible to beat.

      I also don't think it's because google has smarted people making more specialized systems.

      Is it because a

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      It's the network effect: you stay big by being big. Google can index more and faster because they have ad money to fund it, and they have ad money because everybody comes to Google because they index more and faster.

    • It's because search is a virtuous cycle, so market share matters.

      Google search started with a better system, but the system relies on data. People started using it, and the results were great, but not always perfect. That's fine: Google would take note of the times people came back and searched for the same thing and adjust their algorithms. That has a cumulative effect.

      If you broke Google into two new Googles, each with exactly the same algorithm and no data, and gave one 50.1% of the market and the other

      • It isn't all about the quality of the search results in and of themselves. The quality of the user-interface around the search results matters too. This is where Apple could potentially have an advantage. They control the iOS/Safari user-interface and if they have good ideas to better integrate it into the UI they have the ability to do so.

        I am not saying that they do have such ideas, just that if they did, they could exploit their control. And realize that Apple's goal will probably never be to directly ma

        • As long as the results are good enough most of the time, nobody cares.

          There are plenty of us who don't use google - ever - and it doesn't seem to be a problem getting a relevant result within the top 5 results.

          Then again, I don't want results that include YouTube or Facebook or instagram or Twitter, so anyone not putting emphasis on those is going to be subjectivity better.

          Podcasts? Influencers? Celebrities known for being celebrities? DIAF.

          • The problems that I have mainly stem from me looking up extremely technical stuff about emacs and lisp. I don't know why Google does better at it, but it does.

      • The one thing that is easily overlooked is just how many searches are done on iPhones via Siri. All those searches are shared with Apple before being passed on. Presumably, all of those will be used to train the search engine -before- they launch it publicly. ...and instantly google could lose a decent chunk of organic search on mobile. Apple may be able to get a close second and possibly even put pressure on the old Goog a bit.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • History (Score:3)

    by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @12:09PM (#60658566) Homepage Journal

    Historically when Apple has wanted to do something like this it hasn't gone well. Apple usually buys someone who is doing it already and then integrates their product, like they did with Siri, and then lets it stagnate.

    Even worse is when they develop it in-house and you end up with Apple Maps.

    • I disagree. They may have disappointing things like Siri but they also have some enormous successes. Look at PA Semi. They did pretty well there with their A-series processors (close to Intel-level performance, at least for laptops and other small form-factor devices). Look at Beats. They did pretty well there as well. Apple Music is doing pretty damn well.

      Apple Maps is much better than when they released it.

      Apple is one of the few companies with the resources - and possibly the motivation - to create a dec

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        I disagree. They may have disappointing things like Siri but they also have some enormous successes. Look at PA Semi. They did pretty well there with their A-series processors (close to Intel-level performance, at least for laptops and other small form-factor devices).

        Apple is reasonably good at chip design. That was true long before the Intel transition. Remember that in the pre-Intel days, they used a CPU from Motorola or IBM, but everything else was custom ASICs. So it isn't surprising that they would do well at it, given their history of having done so previously.

        Look at Beats. They did pretty well there as well.

        Their products sucked before Apple bought them. Do they suck less now? I haven't even bothered to pay attention. If I were picking an Apple headphone product to use as a success story, I'd have used Ai

  • How about not doing that and use DuckDuckgo as standard search engine? Making their own seems to me about the same as MS bundling IE with Windows.

    • How about not doing that and use DuckDuckgo as standard search engine? Making their own seems to me about the same as MS bundling IE with Windows.

      It's probably about control. All these big companies want control over everything they are associated with.

    • A simple response: money. They make tons of money from Google at the moment. I doubt DuckDuckGo can even remotely compete.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mark-t ( 151149 )

      How about not doing that and use DuckDuckgo as standard search engine?

      Because DuckDuckGo doesn't return results for a given search that are as useful as Google results, perhaps?

      • The results returned by google get less accurate by the day. Bring on a search engine that doesn't ignore keywords!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )

          Such an assertion, even if it is true, is largely irrelevant to how useful Google's search results are compared to DuckDuckGo's for the moment...

          If you are the kind of person who likes to use a search engine because maybe, in 10 or 15 years, it might actually be on par with other players, knock yourself out.

          But some of us still would rather use a tool that is actually useful today.

    • Doesn't DDG use Bing for searches? It's no worse than google now.

  • Might as well. No one is using for much.

    • I thought Yahoo and Bing are partnering to share resources. Perhaps Apple can join in. They can maybe run independent systems but share crawling info to split the load. Come up with some agreed on standards to enable content sharing yet leave the systems split-able if they later want to go their own way.

  • Seems like they could just run it through SIRI and give you everything that DOESN'T match, no?

  • broadening itself to death (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Micah NC ( 5616634 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @12:36PM (#60658752)
    When Jobs left the first time, Apple tried to be all things to all people and crashed.

    They tried making enterprise machines and bloated their offerings.

    What is Apple if they are courting enterprise stuff?

    The first thing Jobs did when he came back was chop all that stuff up.

    Apple users don't care about this.

    This is destined to fail.

    • As an Apple user (Mac, iPhone, Apple TV) I'm caring deeply about this. Not because I think Apple may give me better results than Google, but because I've come to fear all the data siphoning that Google, Facebook and others do.

      As I'm already using Apple products to begin with, using an Apple-made search engine would at least reduce my virtual footprint, make it even harder for other companies to spy on me. And given Apple's stance on privacy and the steps they have taken so far, they're the ones I trust the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      Bring back Steve Jobs again! Oh wait. :(

  • Well im sorry for apple users... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alexborges ( 313924 ) on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @12:49PM (#60658822)

    Apple maps suck. Streaming in itunes sucks. Itunes mostly sucks. Apple music is okay, but spotify is better. Apple's clooud storage really is good for mostly nothing.

    Apple does great, beautiful machines. Online services is not their thing. I hope they don't go all "appley" on us and split the web for safari to make their stuff work as intended.

    Yeah, google is a monopoly. But its one that benefits from multibrowser compatibility and open source software. I pick that evil over the proprietary option which well, I cant even afford, let alone pick.

  • jump from one high walled garden into another high walled garden.
    Probably cost 30% of all potential sales to even get listed ;)
  • There ARE alternatives...I figure if I can't find it on the alternatives, I don't need to find it anyway.
  • You mean that small Cali company that copies everyone's idea?

  • And it was an almost immediate failure! One of those things the Jobs fans would love to forget he put his weight behind!

  • Consider Apple is using their dominance in the smartphone market to enter the search market.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by irving47 ( 73147 )

      I am not sure how trying to break free of Google's stranglehold is anti-competitive on their own devices.

  • It will cost Apple billions and billions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by PhunkySchtuff ( 208108 ) <kai&automatica,com,au> on Wednesday October 28, 2020 @05:16PM (#60660084) Homepage

    It will cost Apple billions and billions of dollars to replace Google search on iOS.
    Not just in the cost involved to develop and host the search engine, but also the opportunity cost in _not_ having Google as the default search provider.
    Google pay Apple somewhere between $8Bn and $12Bn per year to be the default search engine in Safari on macOS and iOS. Of these, being the default search engine on iOS is by far the most valuable.
    https://www.npr.org/2020/10/22... [npr.org]

    That's a massive income stream to forego just to have your own search engine. I truly wish them the best of luck.

    • Part of the problem is that search engine advertising isn't making the sales any more. People just go to Amazon to find what they're looking for. So let your competitors plant the seed by paying Google - but when they're actually ready to buy, its Amazon you need to be on.

      Google and Facebook are looking at huge drop in search advertising revenues because this is becoming the default for more and more people - the pandemic just sped it up.

      So Google will be under financial strain and less willing to pay f

  • Apple dominating the search engine market instead of Google would simply be going out of the frying pan and into the fire, so to speak.

    It would be nice to see an open source search engine with Google's capabilities.

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