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Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight
- tryingagainbro 9y agoWhy doesn't Apple open their checkbook and start their own search engine. I mean, really open it. It's not like they don't have the money and it's not like this is a logical step. They can't start small, meaning the need users to train the SE? What else can it be. Of course they can't put live a horrible version...
- xRahul 9y agoHave you seen their attempts with Maps. I can't imagine how the search would go. They already have so much bad press with Maps, I'm sure they don't want more added to it.
- lucaspiller 9y agoIs this because Apple is so bad, or just that Google is so much better than everyone else? I’ve never used physical satnav units, but how do they compare to Apples offerings?
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoThe main aftermarket satnav products are from Garmin and TomTom - and in-car systems tend to either license their tech or use NavTeq/HERE. Even Apple Maps bootstrapped off TomTom and still largely just aggregates from other sources. I use iOS, but I very much prefer using Google Maps to Apple Maps: mainly for the Google Account integration, and it feels like they provide more information (shop/restaurant hours, street-view) even though Apple Maps provides almost the same level of detail. On my desktop I use a Google Maps and the map design is the same so familiarity helps, whereas Apple Maps is strictly off-limits for Windows and Linux users. Given that Apple and Microsoft are no-longer competing in the mobile space (MSFT finally admitted Windows Phone's failure earlier this year) maybe we can see Apple choosing MSFT/Bing services over Google? Apple could save a lot of money by switching to Bing Maps, and with a re-skin no-one would notice!
- chrisper 9y agoHERE has their own app, too. It is not bad, but sadly not quite Google Maps level. https://wego.here.com https://wego.here.com https://here.com/en/products-services/consumer-app/here-wego-app https://here.com/en/products-services/consumer-app/here-wego... Btw. HERE is owned by Audi and some other car companies.
- dpcx 9y agoIt also has an offline feature that most other mobile map services would kill for.
- izacus 9y agoIt varies by location a lot, but here in central Europe, Garmin units (including builtin satnav) tend to be more accurate and carry more car-relevant information (speed limits, etc.) than Apple Maps. Same goes for Google Maps as well, which still don't have speed limits available which is kind of critical when driving through unfamiliar streets.
- toephu2 9y agoHave you used Apple Maps recently? It's not that bad anymore. Just because they had bad press about it 5 years ago doesn't mean the product is still stuck in 2012.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoGreat point. Yeah they got bad press, but are no longer hostage to Google Maps and have an acceptable maps product that gets improved as time goes by. If Tim Cook decides that $10billion in acquisition /hiring is needed for seearch, I'm sure he'll have it in a few hours from the board. Apple might release the search engine to just a xx% at a time and rotate to see /get data to tweak it (if it's feasible) or make Apple Search default but give option to switch for a few years. Search is like maps, a core product.
- SirHound 9y ago"Not that bad" doesn't really stand up to Google Maps, which is excellent.
- thestephen 9y agoWhile your sentiment probably holds correct in some places, it really is "that bad" in some places that aren't the US or the UK. Many countries still don't have transit, and my apartment (in Stockholm!) doesn't even exist in Apple Maps.
- wrboyce 9y agoHave you ever submitted an error report? I moved house just over 12 months ago and there were some errors on both Apple and Google maps. I submitted error reports to both providers, Apple had it fixed in around 48 hours whereas Google have still not fixed it. At least one of the errors is extremely easy to verify and fix.
- macintux 9y agoI've had mixed results. I report errors to Apple fairly regularly, and while some are fixed quickly, some are seemingly ignored forever. Even in the US, there are a lot of missing POI on Apple Maps. Parks in particular are woefully underrepresented.
- abritinthebay 9y agoI've been preferring Maps to Google's utterly user-hostile experience for quite a while now. It's odd - Google does have a great mapping product: it's called Waze. That's great on a phone! But Google Maps? Christ... it's so bad. All of their iPhone apps are downright user-hostile but Maps is the worst.
- Hoasi 9y ago> Google does have a great mapping product: it's called Waze. Waze is an independent company.
- Nilef 9y agoNope (http://investvine.com/google-buys-map-software-provider-waze-for-1b/ http://investvine.com/google-buys-map-software-provider-waze...)
- skinnymuch 9y agoYou mean after Google bought them four years ago? They had independence to a degree and were allowed to stay in Israel for 3 years after signing an agreement, but that time has passed. At this point they are completely under Google.
- amelius 9y agoThey don't have to brand it "Apple" initially.
- notsuretho 9y agoHad they started the search offering with the maps offering, I think they’d be on par with Bing for 95% of searches. That said, there’s a lot to be said for concentrating on strengths.
- bigbugbag 9y agoProbably because it costs a serious amount of money to make, requires a very expensive infrastructure with high maintenance cost and does not bring in any serious money. Also they probably lack the skill to do this.
- tryingagainbro 9y ago>>it costs a serious amount of money to make, requires a very expensive infrastructure with high maintenance cost...Also they probably lack the skill to do this.... " all solved by money, virtually unlimited money as Apple makes $45+ billion in income each year and has some $200+ billion in bank. They can bid against google for google's top search engineers and Google will run out of money first.. There is a lot of money in search, maybe not as much as Google is making now (90% of their page is ads) but still a lot money, more than enough to make the investment worthwhile.
- iaml 9y agoThey'd rather stick to building devices.
- robryan 9y agoDoesn't Microsoft also basically have a bottomless checkbook to spend on search? And Bing can't compete.
- romanovcode 9y agoI think MS just does not care too much about Bing anymore, it's all about Azure nowadays.
- skinnymuch 9y agoThey've tried hard with Bing for so many years now. It's also profitable. They re-did their Yahoo deal a few years ago too. They care about Bing it seems, but it's clear they can't make much headway.
- skinnymuch 9y agoOP seems to be saying to throw a ton of money at search. Microsoft spent billions in losses over the past decade. Profitable now, but market share isn't too strong. And a lot of the market share gains are from Yahoo anyway. So I agree. I don't see how Yahoo double or triple spending what Bing spent helping. Especially if they start out in 2017. On the other hand, if they work with Bing and have some sort of search engine Joint Venture with money and smarts poured in, maybe they can put a dent into search. I doubt Apple who care about profits so much would be down for such an endeavor.
- macintux 9y agoSacrifice billions a year from Google to spend billions a year trying to compete, for zero additional revenue? That's a tough sales pitch.
- tryingagainbro 9y agoWhy zero additional revenue? Once it get good enough non-Apple device users will use it.
- macintux 9y agoYou're right: not zero, but I suspect just a rounding error on their books. Apple's ability to monetize ads, particularly given their stance on privacy, is suspect, and I'm not sure how else one would make money with a search engine.
- sidcool 9y agoWonder how much Google paid them.
- grzm 9y ago$3 billion is the number in the article.
- andy_ppp 9y agoWith the amount of data Apple has from Siri I’m constantly surprised they don’t at least have a stab at building a search engine, possibly one with very fine grained privacy/accuracy controls.
- skbohra123 9y agoYou have to understand that search engine is not a reflection of what people search. It's about searching the 'web'.
- elaus 9y agoI don't think Apple does "fine grained controls"
- m_mueller 9y agoFor the specific context of privacy, they have had more fine-grained controls than Android since the inception of the appstore, until release of Android 6.0 where Android AFAIK has caught up.
- kuschku 9y agoAlmost, but still not. There’s still no way to revoke android.permission.INTERNET And if you revoke any permission to any Google apps, all of them will refuse to do shit, and you can’t even place calls without giving Google access to your location, body sensors, bluetooth, etc.
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- AlphaWeaver 9y agoIs this a response to Bill Gates saying he's switching to Android?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jakebasile 9y agoI really wish they'd let me set Siri to search DuckDuckGo.
- craftyguy 9y agoApple Knows Best(TM)
- azurezyq 9y agoDDG has a long way to go on long tail queries. In search industry, you can probably spend 1x time and resources to reach 90% Google's relevance score. However, to reach 95% or more, you probably need 100x in time and resources. E.g., NLP in query understanding; Knowledge Graph in webpage understanding; Much larger corpus; Location awareness, etc.
- tesseract 9y agoFor true long tail queries it seems to me that often (speaking only as a Google user, not an expert) the NLP really ends up getting in the way by causing the query to be reinterpreted as something more mainstream. But I agree that it's important for getting high quality results for a lot of common queries. And that quality and relevance scoring of results is also a hard problem.
- tanilama 9y agoFor what reason. Apparently, aside from their tight relationship with Google, Bing's result is not good enough for Apple to continue, since DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, who is backed up Bing, I don't see a legit cause for Apple to switch to it.
- partiallypro 9y agoQuality of results had absolutely nothing to do with the decision, Google and Microsoft bid on the right to be the search engine. Since Microsoft had already been on the platform they may have seen poor or negative ROI from the deal. Google outbid them with a $3 Billion deal, simple as that. Simple searches you would do from your phone would be/are neck and neck between Google and Bing, where they diverge a bit are more complex/technical queries.
- aeleos 9y agoI wonder how this will work with apples recent fight against online advertisers. If google does track users but it is all anonymous from the advertisers perspective, does that mean Apple is okay with it?
- xbmcuser 9y agoMaybe thats the reason they went back with Google now they didnt want Google to have apple customer data for competitive reason but now that they have a system in place to block that they have gone with the best search engine.
- romanovcode 9y agoI doubt that google would pay $3B for just anonymous search texts. They must be tracking you.
- nicodjimenez 9y agoPoor Bing, I never thought I'd find myself rooting for Microsoft, but here I am.
- dchuk 9y agoThey need to get this switched over for voice activated Siri, no one in the history of the planet has wanted their hands-free, verbal question answered with a screen full of Bing search results...complete waste.
- ProfessorLayton 9y agoIrrespective of the source, that’s just bad UX. I would rather is respond with “I don’t know but I can search the web of you’d like” or something like that. It’s especially useless while driving. At this point I wish I could turn off safari results altogether.
- teej 9y ago99% of my Siri usage is "Hey Siri, google search for X." I'm happy that they'll be switching.
- throwaway47861 9y agoWARNING: Meta comment. Downvote to your heart's content. I am very disappointed and disheartened by a good chunk of the HN commenters right here in this thread. I would expect Apple hating in some Android-focused outlet where people get points and badges based on how much times they repeat "iSheep" in an hour, but here?! Boys and girls around here, HN is the modern place where the more intelligent and supposedly open-minded folk gathers. It's one of the last bastions of free thought which isn't a filter bubble. You should be much better than what you show. "Yeah but Apple doesn't protect privacy, it just..." "Everybody looks privacy-oriented when compared to Google..." "Google just collects data for its ad platform which people view as a bad thing..." "Apple plays the privacy card to get more customers..." etc. ...Seriously? Look, none of us knows for sure. But talking like that disqualifies you from any intelligent and adult discussion in my eyes; and yes, you aren't much better than the Google fanboys I stumble upon daily on Google+ and 9GAG. Hence I am using a throwaway account. I am pretty sure plenty of people won't take this comment well. Do better. A good part of you here are a disgrace to watch. And you're supposed to be an intellectual elite. Damn.
- jhasse 9y agoWhat's wrong about "Everybody looks privacy-oriented when compared to Google..."?
- AndrewDucker 9y agoIt's so incredibly non-specific that it's impossible to argue with. If you want to make a point about Google and privacy then make a specific one that people can debate.
- jhasse 9y agoIt's not about Google, but about Apple being privacy-oriented. The argument is that people wouldn't call Apple privacy-oriented if it weren't for its competitors like Google being even worse in that regard.
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- sitepodmatt 9y agoBing is still poor for obscure searches, e.g. today Im searching for other poor folks dealing with ebay's API and the message "Invalid store category name" in quotes. Bing 0, DuckDuckGo 0, Google plenty. Reality is most of my tech searches are like this and hence I can't give up Google, or I can at cost of either my time or my clients. It be nice to have another search engine with depth of Google but nothing comes close, it's like the old days of Yahoo directory vs AltaVista, you could never find the serialz on Yahoo.
- throwawaykf09 9y agoWhile Bing was poor for tech related searches in the earlier days, I find it's no longer true. Are you sure it’s 0 results on Bing? I get a bunch of relevant-looking results, and they’re all different from what Google gave me (just the first page): https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Invalid+store+category+name%22 https://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Invalid+store+category+name... Some weird personalization thing? Interested in seeing what others see when they click that link...
- TimonKnigge 9y agoI get no results following your link.
- isolli 9y agoMe neither...
- irishsultan 9y agoI got no results either, then I decided to switch my country/region to US English which resulted in a lot of results. Rather strange to localize results so much (especially when the alternatives are showing many results vs. showing no results)
- thomasahle 9y agoMaybe Bing is still doing this: http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-... In that case, the hacker news interest would probably get the page included in Bing, but it would take some time before everyone would start seeing it.
- thegayngler 9y agoPrivacy cancelled.
- fhood 9y agoread...the....article
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mikeash 9y agoThis is great. Maybe I'll start using this feature again. But, my god, would it kill them to implement a few different search engines and let us choose?
- m3kw9 9y agoBing gives obvious inferior results when I have been using it
- ksk 9y agoI've been trying to use bing as a primary and google as a backup for a few months now. IME, Bing is good 60-70% of the time, but often times I'm exploratory-searching and bing is pretty much useless here. Google, manages to somehow find the right link, especially when I am guessing the keywords. On a side note, Google often tells me theres million+ results (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=SIEMENS+pc+based+automation https://www.google.com/search?q=SIEMENS+pc+based+automation ) and then shows me only 10 pages of 10 each. Seems like over the years Google has been pruning the results quite a bit.
- snag 9y agoI went all the way to page 10. At the bottom, it reads : In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 100 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
- ksk 9y agoYeah, but that still doesn't show all the supposedly millions of results. Last time I checked it was capped at a few hundred (not this specific query).
- blue11 9y agoI have heard from ex-Bing engineers that Microsoft had deprioritized search R&D a couple of years ago. Since then there has been an exodus of engineers from that group.