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The way I think about it, Google's interests aren't aligned with Apple's interests. Think about the money that Apple has invested in their own bespoke ARM chip

The way I think about it, Google's interests aren't aligned with Apple's interests. Think about the money that Apple has invested in their own bespoke ARM chips. They could have stuck with Broadcom or Samsung chips for the iPhone but they didn't. They wanted things that they couldn't get access to through a supplier, and a competitive advantage. If I were an executive at Apple I would look at the risk every supplier contributed to overall profitability and margins. And I would look to see how much value I could capture for Apple vs paying it out to third parties. So for me the question is about "How much of the user experience can I ensure will meet my standards?" and having your own search engine would help there. There are other values as well when you can make large scale semantic queries against the entire web. And it can be extremely lucrative to tie the "search experience" as a feeder into your other products (which is part of what the Justice department doesn't like about Google)

jeffbee 6y ago
That logic made no sense at all. The money Apple spends developing its own CPUs is a fraction of the money they would have had to spend anyway to buy vendor CPUs. But they don't have to buy search. Search buys them! Developing their own search would convert search from a gigantic revenue stream with 100% gross margins into a massive operating expense. It's the opposite of making their own CPUs.
- wmf 6y ago
  Presumably if Apple developed their own search engine they'd also have ads which would make similar (or higher) profit that Google makes from search ads.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    Maybe, but it's a fair bet that they'd have the same or higher fixed costs, lower traffic, and the same or lower revenue per search. Apple hasn't really demonstrated that they can operate data infrastructure at that scale with Google's cost structure (nobody has, but especially not Apple).
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  It makes a ton of sense. If you could have google quality search without the tracking or ads, imaging how many more iPhones Apple would sell, and how much more people would be willing to pay for them.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    > If you could have google quality search without the tracking This is a hypothetical of the frog-with-wings variety.
    - ChuckMcM 6y ago
      Using tests that are similar to what Google used internally to measure search quality in the 2006 - 2010 time frame, a side by side comparison Bing and Google have equal search quality and on contested searches like "good mortgage rate" Google's search quality is actually worse.
      - jeffbee 6y ago
        I can't dispute that this is accurate for you, but for me I'm not seeing it. Bing gives me a knowledge box that says "Average Mortgage Rates Today" and lists a table with 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARM and an average rate for each. That would be a good result but despite the title the rates are from 2018. Google gives me bankrate.com in the #1 paid and the #1 organic position. This seems like a superior result. In general I think it is hard to judge search quality from a query like this which is incredibly lucrative for search engines. There's an adversarial process between quality, SEO, and advertisers.

jeffbee 6y ago

That logic made no sense at all. The money Apple spends developing its own CPUs is a fraction of the money they would have had to spend anyway to buy vendor CPUs. But they don't have to buy search. Search buys them! Developing their own search would convert search from a gigantic revenue stream with 100% gross margins into a massive operating expense. It's the opposite of making their own CPUs.

wmf 6y ago
Presumably if Apple developed their own search engine they'd also have ads which would make similar (or higher) profit that Google makes from search ads.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Maybe, but it's a fair bet that they'd have the same or higher fixed costs, lower traffic, and the same or lower revenue per search. Apple hasn't really demonstrated that they can operate data infrastructure at that scale with Google's cost structure (nobody has, but especially not Apple).
sthnblllII 6y ago
It makes a ton of sense. If you could have google quality search without the tracking or ads, imaging how many more iPhones Apple would sell, and how much more people would be willing to pay for them.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  > If you could have google quality search without the tracking This is a hypothetical of the frog-with-wings variety.
  - ChuckMcM 6y ago
    Using tests that are similar to what Google used internally to measure search quality in the 2006 - 2010 time frame, a side by side comparison Bing and Google have equal search quality and on contested searches like "good mortgage rate" Google's search quality is actually worse.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      I can't dispute that this is accurate for you, but for me I'm not seeing it. Bing gives me a knowledge box that says "Average Mortgage Rates Today" and lists a table with 30-year fixed, 15-year fixed, 5/1 ARM and an average rate for each. That would be a good result but despite the title the rates are from 2018. Google gives me bankrate.com in the #1 paid and the #1 organic position. This seems like a superior result. In general I think it is hard to judge search quality from a query like this which is incredibly lucrative for search engines. There's an adversarial process between quality, SEO, and advertisers.