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Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? 12 billion might just be the cost of keeping them out of the search market. It's not 2000 anymore.
by lumost 6y ago
Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? 12 billion might just be the cost of keeping them out of the search market.
It's not 2000 anymore. Building a web scale search engine no longer requires novel distributed systems work, and the most viable search algorithms have strong open source implementations. It's still a very hard problem to get right, but you can create an "interesting" poc in a few weeks. Recent work on unspervised content based recommenders can help reduce click stream data requirements.
- lehi 6y ago> Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? App Store search says.
- mjlee 6y agoI've never used the Google Play store - is it actually much better?
- Denvercoder9 6y agoNo, it's pretty much garbage.
- ffpip 6y agoIt's filled with ads and open source ripoffs. These kind of apps don't exist in App Store due to heavy human review.
- snazz 6y agoIt's worth mentioning that Apple's human review can be very incompetent. They rejected an update to iSH on TestFlight (https://ish.app https://ish.app) because the reviewer thought that the app's shell prompt was a "blank screen". That said, in general, I appreciate the greater average quality of apps in the App Store.
- robertlagrant 6y ago> open source ripoffs What's an open source ripoff?
- greenyoda 6y agoI'm guessing it means rebranding an open source app that's actually available for free, and charging money for it.
- ffpip 6y agoA developer copies an open source app, adds advertisements, and publishes it to the play store as a closed source app. He promotes his app over the original app by paying Google.
- Grimm1 6y agoI don't generally just browse apps so like if you know what you're looking for and go to it it's the same as if you searched an exact name on the apple one -- but if you're just browsing around it's got a lot of lower quality stuff.
- aey 6y agoGoogle android app search is just as bad. That’s because “store search” is a totally different problem than indexing the web. Even indexing the web is a different problem now than in 2000, users expect the search results that are SEO optimized for google.
- _qulr 6y agoApple support forum search. Developer documentation search. Developer forum search. All absolutely terrible. I use Google with site:apple.com to search all of these instead. If Apple search capabilities are a hidden asset, then they're very well hidden.
- cageface 6y agoApple Music search is also horrible. It's almost like they're doing something as naive as an exact string match.
- onion2k 6y agoThose examples would be a solid reason for Apple to invest in improving their search tech, which could naturally lead to launching a non-Google search engine to use across Apple apps possibly including Safari...
- utopcell 6y agoIf Apple wanted a search engine, they would have bought Yahoo for ~$4B when it was up for sale 4 years ago.
- kungito 6y agoAre Bing and DDG using those algorithms? Because every 6-8 months I give one of them a try and they are horrible. First I force myself a week of no falling back to Google when I cannot find anything and then slowly I just give up again. Did they misunderstand something elementary?
- tobr 6y agoDDG really isn’t horrible anymore. It’s weaker than Google in some areas, stronger in others. I stopped reflexively adding `!g` to my searches some time ago.
- dybber 6y agoDepends on the country you’re in, DDG still doesn’t give meaningful results for most danish queries is my impression after 6 months of use.
- tobr 6y agoYes, local searches (if that’s what you mean) would be one of its weak points. On the other hand, there are often various good local search providers who have bangs that you can use directly, with better SERPs than Google for the relevant queries.
- Grimm1 6y agoTurn off all the data collection in Google and personalization from it and compare the results. They go down in quality considerably in my experience. Even with those features on I find constantly outdated information these days. Yup that article from 2012 Techcrunch with the broken links is really helping me Google. Disclosure: Currently running an alternative search engine. However I legitimately don't like Google search or Google's practices in the search market, so much so it actually prompted us to throw our hat in the ring. Edit: I just made the search again, "Techcrunch submission form" The first result for me is from 2006, not 2012, https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/01/how-to-submit-your-company-to-techcrunch/ https://techcrunch.com/2006/02/01/how-to-submit-your-company...
- TuringNYC 6y agoIt is important to not confuse Google Reader/Notes/Chat with Google Search. Google Search is the gateway to Google's vast profits and they put many of their best people on keeping the product top notch. There are probably hundreds of sub-models and thousands of optimizations that would take years to build out.
- zepto 6y agoGoogle search is optimized for driving advertising revenue. A competitor who wasn’t shackled to that business model would have a lot of freedom to innovate.
- lanstin 6y agoI think they win big on advertising because they auction keywords. That was a novel idea and the one really big economic success they have had which funds everything else. I don’t think they need to make search less good to get more money. They do put the add more and more prominently, but the raw search results seem to be steadily improving if you can get used to the idea they are now trying to understand your intent instead of just grep’ing the internet.
- zepto 6y agoIt’s not that they need to make it less good. It’s that they need to make it less controllable and flexible. They get paid for each keyword search you do that generates advertising clicks. Most people seem to disagree with you about the raw results improving. They certainly don’t seem to be for me.
- fakedang 6y agoMy recent experience with Google Search says otherwise. First 4-5 links are ads, the next might be relevant. Page 2 onwards is definitely irrelevant.
- overkill28 6y ago> Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? Wouldn't it be ironic if the DOJ case fell apart because Apple released it's own search engine?
- ralfd 6y ago> Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? A decent search engine is not worth the massive amount of 12 billion dollars. The advertising platform Google build is! Apple 1) can't recreate that 2) it shouldn't as advertising is not in their DNA and opposite of their privacy core values. Apple can build a search engine (or just switch to Bing) but they wouldn't be able monetize that for $12000000000.
- GeekyBear 6y ago> Who says apple hasn't built a viable alternative already? They certainly have been hiring people who know how to build search tech. >Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-googles-ai-chief.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
- summerlight 6y ago> It's not 2000 anymore. This is true, but not in a way you think. Conventional wisdom tells us that you're gonna need completely different approaches across the stack (not just technological but organizational as well) when a problem size grows 10x, and the web has grown about 100x from 2000.