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Apple building search engine to take on Google, report claims
- judge2020 6y agoI’d be more surprised if they weren’t ready for the time when Google stops paying to be the default search engine. Can't wait to see a "choose your search engine" screen on setup of new phones.
- ackbar03 6y agoI think there are definitely some tremors in this space. I feel like we could see some action further on? what do others think?
- Game_Ender 6y agoYou 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. Leveraged properly all the OS level use from iOS could provide a lot of signal on which to build a search product. If only Apple’s was able to do so for speech recognition.
- totaldude87 6y agoi would rather like to see apple buying DDG (duck duck go) instead of diving straight in. The flip side is DDG becoming next Siri :(
- VHRanger 6y agoDDG Has a heavy professional focus (stackoverflow integrations, etc.) Apple is a consumer focused company.
- bserge 6y agoOof, I remember when the Mac Pro was the dream of every professional...
- metalliqaz 6y agoNo! Don't let Apple corrupt DDG!
- loughnane 6y agoThat would be a real shame. Having independent players in the space is important.
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- username90 6y ago> An Apple search engine would almost certainly have one massive selling point: increased user privacy. More likely the search engine would give Apple a reason to collect more user data. It isn't like a significant number of people pick Apple because of privacy and they know it. The main reason they don't collect anything now is because it isn't worth it, but with a search engine it would be.
- kumarvvr 6y agoI really can't see how you have come to that conclusion. They could make good amount of money by simple advertising, the way google started out. The main reason the don't collect anything now is because they are a Hardware Platform company. They make much more than google, without any data collection. If they wanted to do data collection, they wouldn't harp about not collecting data so long. They would have kept mum.
- adventured 6y agoIt's also a potential massive profit machine just on the iOS platform if the only thing they do is weak advertising targeting (search for shoes, get ads for shoes). iOS is such a large platform that Apple doesn't need to abuse privacy to derive immense profit from search. Google does it out of greed, because $50b or $60b in sales isn't enough versus the $166b they're getting now. Apple could try to make a lot more money off of their iOS platform right now by becoming very aggressive at abusing privacy. They don't do it because the already lucrative path they've chosen gives them a big competitive advantage in the age of privacy violation. If Google were a thinner organization instead of a hugely bloated monster conglomerate, and if they ran advertising with weak targeting, they would be a very profitable, very large company at a far lower sales level. That wasn't ambitious enough for Google. Google's privacy abusing margin is Apple or Duck's opportunity.
- chongli 6y agoI 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). 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.
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- fluidcruft 6y agoYeah, great. A search engine that will somehow require me to buy Apple hardware.
- rootusrootus 6y agoAt least it gives you the option to choose. Some people will be more willing to pay directly rather than endure ads.
- blocked_again 6y agoSome people just use adblock.
- rootusrootus 6y agoAnd some people consider that theft.
- rootusrootus 6y agoY'all are jumping through some serious mental hoops. Nobody on HN can claim to be naive enough not to understand the ad model of financing content, so ad blocking IS essentially theft. Avoid the content if you find the means of paying for it objectionable; vote with your wallet.
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- dgerges 6y agoThey 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
- swiley 6y agoTheir "space for disruption" will probably be exclusive iOS integration, just like most of their recent "innovations."
- metalliqaz 6y agoEnding 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'm looking for obscure technical issues. Bing and Yahoo (DDG) havn't made a dent, lets see what happens.
- yepthatsreality 6y agoPeople always list this as a negative but that’s one of the features of DDG: to search other engines.
- adventured 6y agoApple should buy DDG, rebrand it simply as Duck (plus they already have the domain), leave the privacy focus fully in place and have Weinberg run the search division, and push a large investment of capital into turning DDG into a full-fledged independent Google competitor. Of course I'd worry that Apple wouldn't be able to help themselves and would try to call it Apple Search (Search by Apple), and the web location would be something absurd like search.apple.com or apple.com/search instead of duck.com. If Apple builds a modestly successful search engine for their iOS platform, it's going to hurt Duck's absolute growth potential. It'd be better for everyone if they just buy them and ride + improve existing momentum.
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- metalliqaz 6y agoRemember Dark Sky?
- buzzerbetrayed 6y agoYes, because it is still a thing. What are you referring to? How Apple didn't change it when they bought it?
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- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoIt will be to other search engines as Ping was to social networks. Apple is not very good at its cloud offerings. Never had been.
- justinph 6y agoI don't think this holds true anymore. It takes Apple some time to get their cloud offerings right, but eventually they do. iCloud works pretty good these days. iCloud photos is pretty slick and just works. Does it go down once in a while? Yeah, but so does GCP every now and then.
- throwaways885 6y agoApple is a hardware company, Google is a cloud software company. They do cross over (iCloud, Pixel), but I doubt they'll ever match each other in terms of their respective domains.
- philliphaydon 6y agoGoogle isn’t a very good software company. They kill off anything we like. Makes it difficult to buy into the Google ecosystem when you’re not sure if it will exist in a couple of years time. Other than Gmail and Google Search. Just too risky. I wouldn’t even touch GCE. Edit: not a dig at engineers at Google who are crazy talented. In reference to Google as a company killing everything off.
- GeekyBear 6y agoApple hired Google's former head of Search and AI. 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...
- WesolyKubeczek 6y agoThey should hire more people who actually understand how server infrastructure works. A healthy head is little comfort if the rest of the body is sick.
- 0goel0 6y agoI would rather that fund/support/use DDG than to their another rose in their garden.
- abc-xyz 6y agoWhy DDG considering they’re for-profit, closed-source and basically just a Bing wrapper with little transparency? Seems like it would make more sense for Apple to build their own Bing wrapper, team up with Microsoft, or build their own search engine from scratch.
- 0goel0 6y agoHow is that any better?
- abc-xyz 6y agoWhat value does DDG bring to Apple? Its user-base is insignificant (Apple will instantly have a larger user-base the moment they set it as the default in Safari). The branding is terrible, especially for Apple. There’s also nothing special about their tech since it’s just a Bing API wrapper. What’s in it for Apple?
- 0goel0 6y agoIf DDG was the default, the user base will increase
- tempodox 6y agoCompetition against Google is always welcome but this will conceivably only work in Safari on Apple devices and require a service subscription.
- andrewgjohnson 6y agoWas the Amazon/IMDB coming-together called an "acquisition"? Can that model be copied for Apple & DuckDuckGo?
- usefulcat 6y agoFor 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 every year for making google the default search engine. Either that, or it’s a feint to undercut the recently announced US case against google.
- asplake 6y agoEvery year while it lasts
- bnj 6y agoThere are other non-financial factors that I'm sure would also be part of the decision making, particularly because Apple can afford to totally forego that $10b from google if they wanted to. Off the top of my head: (1) the reputational cost of marketing privacy but partnering with google on search; (2) the strategic benefit of pulling some portion of iPhone web traffic away from google...
- mgh2 6y agoPrevious thread here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290613
- easton 6y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24338152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24338152 (the previous thread for the changes to Applebot).
- nerdjon 6y agoThis topic seems to come up every couple of years for Apple. But I guess there is actually some evidence for it now. It is something I have wondered about for a long time, I am curious how they would handle it from a financial standpoint. 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? Plus any of the other benefits of building this (like improved Siri).
- supercasio 6y agoAs 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.
- crazygringo 6y agoSo many things about this don't make sense. 1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported. But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand. 2) And financially, they'd trade their incredibly lucrative deal with Google for such a high risk? It just doesn't seem like something a board would approve. 3) The timing of this feels very suspicious, though maybe that'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't you imagine a conversation one or two years ago? "Hey Apple, OK we'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're 'developing' your own search engine. Don't ever deliver it, just always be 'working' on it. Cool? Awesome, thanks."
- kalleboo 6y ago> But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand. They have ads in the App Store already. Search ads are probably the one kind of ad they could make work, since you can sell keywords without tracking and profiling your users.
- nip180 6y agoKeyword ads are significantly less likely to be clicked on than tracked advertising, because keyword ads are less targeted. This is fact confirmed by Google’s and Facebook’s success at selling targeted advertising. If Apple sells keyword ads their search product will never be able to generate as much revenue as Google because the ads will be less effective.
- kalleboo 6y agoI thought it was the other way around? Keyword ads on search results are by far the most profitable since you have intent right there ("what is the best lawn mower"), whereas the vague stalker-ish amazon ads about buying another one of the thing you just bought (or just trying to guess "well homeowners in their 30's might be interested in a lawn mower") have way lower value. Especially on Google Search results, the top ads for brand names are usually for the first search result anyway and people click on them because they're first, making google lots of "free" money as people have to protect the top spot for their own brand
- andy_ppp 6y agoUnfortunately it’ll be about as good as Siri and Maps.
- bengale 6y agoMaps had a rough launch but I find it's good now tbh.
- intellirogue 6y agoI don't know about the US, but outside of it Apple Maps seems to be far more accurate than Google Maps. A few examples from my own personal experience: - A small beach town in New Zealand shows about 10 streets which have never existed, and tries to route you down them. I did some research, and they were paper roads for a planned development ~20 years ago, but were removed from government records ~15 years ago. Google still seem to be using 15+ year old data, and both myself and the local government have failed to get it corrected. - Trying to get from the train station to my Airbnb in an Austrian city, Google's walking directions tried to send me through somebody's back yard. It wouldn't offer any other option, so I switched to Apple Maps which correctly routed me. - A bridge near my apartment in Germany right now is closed to cars for a few months. Bicycles and pedestrians can still use it. Google Maps' walking and cycling directions route around it, Apple correctly sends you over it in walking/cycling modes, but routes around it in driving mode. Entirely anecdotal of course, but I'm yet to experience an issue like this in the other direction, aside from the very early days of Apple Maps before they acquired TomTom's data. I get the impression that outside of the US (where they maintain their own data), Google just hoovers up whatever open data it can find on the web, without any regard to its age or accuracy.
- pier25 6y agoHere in Mexico it's terrible. Even the hardcore Apple fans I know prefer to use Waze or Google maps.
- intellirogue 6y agoInteresting. I guess a big factor would be how widely used OpenStreetMap and TomTom (Apple's two primary data sources) are in a country. OSM is widely used in EU for website map embeds (due to GDPR implications of Google Maps), and TomTom is very common for vehicle GPS in NZ. If neither have wide usage in Mexico, I can see how Apple Maps wouldn't be very good, as they wouldn't have years worth of user-submitted corrections.
- dewey 6y agoThis comes up every few years, especially with facts like them owning siri.com and running the AppleBot crawler already. 2015: https://searchengineland.com/apple-confirms-their-web-crawler-applebot-220423 https://searchengineland.com/apple-confirms-their-web-crawle... It would be nice to have a more private search engine but with Apple's track record of building web services I'm not so optimistic.
- samename 6y agoDDG and Startpage are private search engines, why do you believe Apple’s would be more private than theirs?
- dewey 6y agoI think there's space for more than two private search engines. The difference would be that it would be tightly integrated into the system and probably the default search engine in Safari which comes with an important and huge mobile market share that DDG / Startpage don't have. Most people that are not frequenting HN probably don't even know what DDG or Startpage are because they just use the defaults.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoHopefully better attempt than Siri and Apple Maps.
- gregjw 6y agoI really can't see this happening, and if its does, I can't see it working.
- bttrfl 6y agoI 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.
- akmarinov 6y agoIt's money. They don't make enough to warrant their existence.
- todd3834 6y agoApple 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.
- sjg007 6y agoBoth Apple and even Windows can return web search results. I hate it. I want my devices to be free of web search results unless I am in a browser searching the web.
- throwaway4good 6y agoSo if Apple give up on Google - how can they replace the revenue Google gives Apple? Google makes money by building a profile on every internet user and then uses those profiles to target advertisement. Can Apple do something similar? Apple not so long ago offered iAd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
- nip180 6y agoDoes Maps make money for Apple? Does Siri make money for Apple? Apple has a history of not expecting software to make money. This is changing somewhat with their new push towards subscription services. Maybe this will be used to encourage Apple One adoption.
- GeekyBear 6y agoiAd pretty famously failed because advertisers didn't like Apple's habit of not sharing user data with them. >Despite massive size and overwhelming popularity, Apple has struggled to court Madison Avenue's influential media buyers, the people at advertising agencies who decide where to spend the budgets of the world's biggest brands. According to a new report form Ad Age's Kate Kaye, this issue is due in large part to the company's refusal to share valuable consumer data with its advertising partners, meaning that brands are not able to pinpoint prospective customers with nearly the same precision as they can advertising with Facebook and Google. Here's how Kaye said one executive described Apple's decision not to provide information about individual consumers to its advertising partners on the iAd network, which sells in-app ads on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices: "One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head." https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-people-think-apples-ad-173033632.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-people-think-apples-ad-17...
- preslavrachev 6y agoCan't they just buy DuckDuckGo?
- nikanj 6y agoThe 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
- dvlat 6y agofwiw, if not Bing, there would be no reason for Google to pay that much money to Apple
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoWhy not buy DuckDuckGo?
- jeffbee 6y agoDDG does not possess a single line of search technology nor a single byte of indexes. How are people still confused about this?
- JumpCrisscross 6y agoWouldn’t they have query data?
- jeffbee 6y agoSure, but do they have any that marginally improves what Apple already has via Siri?
- strombofulous 6y agoDDG is just a bing proxy
- philip1209 6y agoI 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. 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). Next up: I expect Apple to launch (or buy) a cloud computing backend. [1] https://www.tinker.fyi/6-break-up-tech-conglomerates/ https://www.tinker.fyi/6-break-up-tech-conglomerates/
- darzu 6y agoMsft has all these as well. With Duo, they’re back in the phone game.
- vaccinator 6y agoAt $1400 it wont be the most popular one... and its a bit big.
- yalogin 6y agoWhat 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.
- chris_f 6y agoThis 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. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- pier25 6y agoIf it works as bad as Siri or iOS keyboard suggestions, I don't think Google has anything to worry about.
- flenserboy 6y agoToo bad there's no money in a search engine that returns results based on exactly what'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.
- saos 6y agoPlease!!
- tmaly 6y agoWhy not just help make DuckDuckGo better? If they are really privacy conscious, this would be the way to go.
- gettingsnarky 6y agoApple, just invest a lot of money in DDG so that they can build the search engine and we can all benefit from that. Not everything needs to be proprietary.
- bronlund 6y agoA search engine not based on ads. Count me in!
- suyash 6y agoI don'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
- cliverani 6y agoApple 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'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.
- SergeAx 6y agoIf 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.
- gerash 6y agoIt definitely is good for consumers. Similar to Apple maps it might not be better than the Google offering but it'll light up a fire up both companies butts to compete for a better product
- nojvek 6y agoGoogle is a trillion dollar company based on 3 very important products. 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) Chrome drives traffic to Google.com as the default search engine. The search engine is more like an ad engine since most of the above fold content is ads. Google’s actions say their motto is “Google ads on every page, on every device” A search engine that doesn’t optimize for ads would be a great boon for humanity.
- bobbydreamer 6y agoWell 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.