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I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own

I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here. In practice I suspect this is really just google paying apple $15B not to compete with its golden goose.

HEmanZ 5y ago
I really think you underestimate how hard it is to "roll a search engine" the size of Google or Bing. Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.
- holografix 5y ago
  No offence but I think you’re wrong. Apple could buy Duck Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it good enough or do the first search on the default search engine.
  - jdavis703 5y ago
    Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal directly with Microsoft? It’s not like Microsoft won’t know Apple bought Duck when it’s time to renew the contract anyways.
  - foo__-bar 5y ago
    Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names
  - HEmanZ 5y ago
    I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing and Google's search engines and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing, and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple. They could buy another search engine, but again getting Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still honestly a massive project. I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on other things.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one) but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with the results and try the query on Google, it's no better there.
      - google234123 5y ago
        Are you sure you don’t have predisposition to that conclusion?
    - nextaccountic 5y ago
      > and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. I'm curious, can you share which one?
- bertil 5y ago
  I remember recent conversations (in June) about search engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_ DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to “tank man” (not the imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with it). That highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might have delegate or contract some aspects of it. It’s not like Apple to not control everything, but they could do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.
  - nicce 5y ago
    Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on top of that, but is based on Bing.
    - bumblebritches5 5y ago
      That's just not true. the CEO of DDG has said numerous times that it's not based on bing, and y'all just love repeating these wild ass rumors for literally no reason.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time sounds like a massive win to me. I think with billions of dollars in funding they could accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally. They don't need to be as good as google.
  - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
    Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware. Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your customers find your software inferior.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      Safari would be evidence against this.
      - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
        I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?
- eitland 5y ago
  Google managed it 20 years ago. Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space. (Estimating from Moores law.) Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a technical perspective.
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem. Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 You can safely assume that for any critical external dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.
pcurve 5y ago
A valid point, but I wonder how effective Apple's search engine will be with their stance on user privacy. I'm sure Apple is perfectly content with letting Google do the dirty work. I don't think there's risk of apple building a successful search engine that can compete with Google, but just paying for Mac users who are not savvy enough to change their default browser to Google. (or bribe against going with Duck.com)
- not_math 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier and better for them to accept the $15B.
  - nicce 5y ago
    DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.
    - YPPH 5y ago
      >DuckDuckGo is literally Bing How so?
      - detaro 5y ago
        In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the search results back and displays them. (adding its own quick results and ads)
        YPPH 5y ago
        Oh, I see. Thanks.
        selykg 5y ago
        I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help page: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... They have their own crawler as well, and there are a bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding to.
todd3834 5y ago
Didn’t this already happen at one point? At least for Siri results I know it did. I feel like it happened on Safari too but it might just have been Siri results. [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-away-from-google-with-bing-integration-in-ios-7/ https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-aw...
- clipradiowallet 5y ago
  I remember this! You'd ask Siri to search for something, and you'd get back Bing results. I thought it was odd because I had never (at the time) used Bing for anything at all. That said, I haven't used an iOS device in some time, and didn't know if that ever changed to Google or another service(Siri search results).
loceng 5y ago
And it's additional $15B R&D fund for Apple to improve its own search system that I can't imagine it's been developing for many years now behind the scenes.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I wish Apple would roll their own- free of ads. But hey- $15B is a lot of money.
- draw_down 5y ago
  If Apple is smart (maybe they are, maybe they aren’t) they’d roll that money straight into developing maps and other services to lessen their devices’ reliance on Google.
zahma 5y ago
It doesn't have to be by default. Like many other preferences Apple asks when it pushes a new version of iOS or macOS, why couldn't this be a choice for users?
snowwrestler 5y ago
Apple did switch to Bing at one point. The default search engine in Safari is likely just a matter of money to them. Apple already competes with Google in some search verticals, for example if you ask Siri to find a pizza restaurant, you will get an iOS pop-up with results that link to Yelp for reviews and Apple Maps for directions. I don’t see Apple competing directly against Google in general-purpose search. But I could definitely see them expanding what iOS does “natively” to include Siri handling more queries itself rather than punting out to Google results.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Which is honestly super annoying on iOS Safari because if you want to highlight and search for something on a page you have to go to the lookup screen, which will almost always be empty, and then click the web search button.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  do they have a deal with yelp? i wish i could swap out tripadvisor as the default for maps results
  - brundolf 5y ago
    I wouldn't mind it if it didn't force me to install the Yelp app to see more details/photos. They must have some kind of deal.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Apple is rolling out their own reviews system so I expect Yelp and the other sources to be phased out in the coming years.
      - brundolf 5y ago
        I dearly hope so. It's the only thing I don't like about Apple Maps.
  - 5y ago
justapassenger 5y ago
Apple understands and knows how to build customer devices and products. They have no understanding of web and infrastructure. Building search engine is way beyond their competency as an organization.
- simonh 5y ago
  They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them learning about them and eventually dominating. I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one. They have built a position on customer privacy and moving into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.
  - baxuz 5y ago
    They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.
    - simonh 5y ago
      That’s fair, fortunately those don’t matter as much.
  - justapassenger 5y ago
    It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all the money in the world, and yet their online services suck. Those are very different worlds, that require organizations built in very different way.
- lucasmullens 5y ago
  I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.
  - shagie 5y ago
    ... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it. I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience? Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.
1024core 5y ago
> I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine IMHO, that's the play behind Neeva[1], to be acquired by Apple. But will Apple give up the sweet, sweet $$$$$ it gets from Google, just to roll its own? [1] https://www.neeva.com/ https://www.neeva.com/
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  Destroying Google dominance in search market will thoroughly damage the company, reducing it to a husk of its former self. This would enormously weaken Apple competitor, strongly improving its market power. It’s most definitely worth to Apple more than $15B/year, as long as they can pull it off, and can avoid antitrust.
908B64B197 5y ago
> I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. For a long time Siri searches were powered by Bing.
qeternity 5y ago
> But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here I think this is even more outlandish than switching to Bing. Google Search accounted for $100B in revenues. iOS has ca. 14% browser market share. Assuming that mobile users search as much or are as valuable as desktop searchers, then that suggests iOS users generate ca. $14B in revenue. Of course, it's likely iOS users are more valuable than the average Google user, but it gives a rough run of the numbers. Google is happy to pay all of this revenue back to Apple so that they don't suffer indirectly in other parts of the business by having an Apple competitor or with Bing as default. Apple on the other hand needs to generate this value from a standing start. It's difficult to see how they'd feasibly get to > $15B net monetization on such a massive and risky undertaking.

HEmanZ 5y ago

I really think you underestimate how hard it is to "roll a search engine" the size of Google or Bing. Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

holografix 5y ago
No offence but I think you’re wrong. Apple could buy Duck Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it good enough or do the first search on the default search engine.
- jdavis703 5y ago
  Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal directly with Microsoft? It’s not like Microsoft won’t know Apple bought Duck when it’s time to renew the contract anyways.
- foo__-bar 5y ago
  Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names
- HEmanZ 5y ago
  I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing and Google's search engines and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing, and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple. They could buy another search engine, but again getting Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still honestly a massive project. I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on other things.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one) but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with the results and try the query on Google, it's no better there.
    - google234123 5y ago
      Are you sure you don’t have predisposition to that conclusion?
  - nextaccountic 5y ago
    > and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. I'm curious, can you share which one?
bertil 5y ago
I remember recent conversations (in June) about search engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_ DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to “tank man” (not the imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with it). That highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might have delegate or contract some aspects of it. It’s not like Apple to not control everything, but they could do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.
- nicce 5y ago
  Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on top of that, but is based on Bing.
  - bumblebritches5 5y ago
    That's just not true. the CEO of DDG has said numerous times that it's not based on bing, and y'all just love repeating these wild ass rumors for literally no reason.
spywaregorilla 5y ago
Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time sounds like a massive win to me. I think with billions of dollars in funding they could accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally. They don't need to be as good as google.
- minsc__and__boo 5y ago
  Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware. Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your customers find your software inferior.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    Safari would be evidence against this.
    - minsc__and__boo 5y ago
      I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?
eitland 5y ago
Google managed it 20 years ago. Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space. (Estimating from Moores law.) Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a technical perspective.
CharlesW 5y ago
> Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem. Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 You can safely assume that for any critical external dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.

pcurve 5y ago

A valid point, but I wonder how effective Apple's search engine will be with their stance on user privacy. I'm sure Apple is perfectly content with letting Google do the dirty work. I don't think there's risk of apple building a successful search engine that can compete with Google, but just paying for Mac users who are not savvy enough to change their default browser to Google. (or bribe against going with Duck.com)

not_math 5y ago
DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier and better for them to accept the $15B.
- nicce 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.
  - YPPH 5y ago
    >DuckDuckGo is literally Bing How so?
    - detaro 5y ago
      In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the search results back and displays them. (adding its own quick results and ads)
      - YPPH 5y ago
        Oh, I see. Thanks.
      - selykg 5y ago
        I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help page: https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so... They have their own crawler as well, and there are a bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding to.

todd3834 5y ago

Didn’t this already happen at one point? At least for Siri results I know it did. I feel like it happened on Safari too but it might just have been Siri results. [0] https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-away-from-google-with-bing-integration-in-ios-7/ https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-aw...

clipradiowallet 5y ago
I remember this! You'd ask Siri to search for something, and you'd get back Bing results. I thought it was odd because I had never (at the time) used Bing for anything at all. That said, I haven't used an iOS device in some time, and didn't know if that ever changed to Google or another service(Siri search results).

loceng 5y ago

And it's additional $15B R&D fund for Apple to improve its own search system that I can't imagine it's been developing for many years now behind the scenes.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

I wish Apple would roll their own- free of ads. But hey- $15B is a lot of money.

draw_down 5y ago
If Apple is smart (maybe they are, maybe they aren’t) they’d roll that money straight into developing maps and other services to lessen their devices’ reliance on Google.

zahma 5y ago

It doesn't have to be by default. Like many other preferences Apple asks when it pushes a new version of iOS or macOS, why couldn't this be a choice for users?

snowwrestler 5y ago

Apple did switch to Bing at one point. The default search engine in Safari is likely just a matter of money to them. Apple already competes with Google in some search verticals, for example if you ask Siri to find a pizza restaurant, you will get an iOS pop-up with results that link to Yelp for reviews and Apple Maps for directions. I don’t see Apple competing directly against Google in general-purpose search. But I could definitely see them expanding what iOS does “natively” to include Siri handling more queries itself rather than punting out to Google results.

Spivak 5y ago
Which is honestly super annoying on iOS Safari because if you want to highlight and search for something on a page you have to go to the lookup screen, which will almost always be empty, and then click the web search button.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
do they have a deal with yelp? i wish i could swap out tripadvisor as the default for maps results
- brundolf 5y ago
  I wouldn't mind it if it didn't force me to install the Yelp app to see more details/photos. They must have some kind of deal.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Apple is rolling out their own reviews system so I expect Yelp and the other sources to be phased out in the coming years.
    - brundolf 5y ago
      I dearly hope so. It's the only thing I don't like about Apple Maps.
- 5y ago

justapassenger 5y ago

Apple understands and knows how to build customer devices and products. They have no understanding of web and infrastructure. Building search engine is way beyond their competency as an organization.

simonh 5y ago
They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them learning about them and eventually dominating. I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one. They have built a position on customer privacy and moving into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.
- baxuz 5y ago
  They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.
  - simonh 5y ago
    That’s fair, fortunately those don’t matter as much.
- justapassenger 5y ago
  It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all the money in the world, and yet their online services suck. Those are very different worlds, that require organizations built in very different way.
lucasmullens 5y ago
I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.
- shagie 5y ago
  ... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it. I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience? Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.

1024core 5y ago

> I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine IMHO, that's the play behind Neeva[1], to be acquired by Apple. But will Apple give up the sweet, sweet $$$$$ it gets from Google, just to roll its own? [1] https://www.neeva.com/ https://www.neeva.com/

xyzzyz 5y ago
Destroying Google dominance in search market will thoroughly damage the company, reducing it to a husk of its former self. This would enormously weaken Apple competitor, strongly improving its market power. It’s most definitely worth to Apple more than $15B/year, as long as they can pull it off, and can avoid antitrust.

908B64B197 5y ago

> I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. For a long time Siri searches were powered by Bing.

qeternity 5y ago

> But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here I think this is even more outlandish than switching to Bing. Google Search accounted for $100B in revenues. iOS has ca. 14% browser market share. Assuming that mobile users search as much or are as valuable as desktop searchers, then that suggests iOS users generate ca. $14B in revenue. Of course, it's likely iOS users are more valuable than the average Google user, but it gives a rough run of the numbers. Google is happy to pay all of this revenue back to Apple so that they don't suffer indirectly in other parts of the business by having an Apple competitor or with Bing as default. Apple on the other hand needs to generate this value from a standing start. It's difficult to see how they'd feasibly get to > $15B net monetization on such a massive and risky undertaking.