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This is a business play, not a privacy one. > No you wouldn't. A search engine is difficult to build, expensive to build, and hard to do right. DuckDuckGo app
by phlo 11y ago
This is a business play, not a privacy one.
> No you wouldn't. A search engine is difficult to build, expensive to build, and hard to do right.
DuckDuckGo appear to do pretty well for themselves, running on $3m of funding and with a team of 21 people. I'm guessing Apple invests more in their products' packaging design than that. If their users' privacy were a concern to them, searching in Safari would use Apple's (privacy-conscious) search engine, and (until Apple perfected their search index) pipe in results from Bing/Google/whomever, just as DDG does.
- e28eta 11y agoApple's working on a web crawler, AppleBot. So far it's not a full Google or DDG replacement, instead focused on app search and discovery. The WWDC session on Search API covered its current uses, and some of the privacy controls they've built into it. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683 https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=709 https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2015/?id=709
- StavrosK 11y agoI don't understand this line of reasoning at all. Does anyone else not see the huge non-sequitur here? The fact that Apple said it cares about privacy doesn't mean it cares enough to build a search engine just for that reason. How can you even argue this with a straight face?
- phlo 11y agoI don't even disagree with you. It's just that my perception of "caring about something" differs from yours. My point being, building a search engine can be done (and done well) with little resources. For comparison: Apple makes about as much profit per hour as DDG had in (total) funding. And (assuming an average tenure of 5 years), Apple hires three times the amount of people a day that make the DDG team. ^1 My argument, thus, goes as follows: If, as a company, you care about something only so little that you are not willing to invest an hours' worth of profit, you probably don't care about it at all. I don't fault Apple for not caring about privacy. Few companies do. I fault them for posing as caring about privacy when their behaviour clearly demonstrates that they care very little. 1: Yes, Apple's hires won't probably have the same skill set as the DDG team. And yes, scaling a search engine from 9M queries a day to what Apple Search would be hit with would take a fair bit of effort. I'm trying to illustrate a point here, so just bear with me ;-)
- sp332 11y agoWhy not? A search engine is one of the biggest leaks of information to third-parties. Apple has its own encrypted messaging system, and a search engine wouldn't be as big a project as that.
- Shebanator 11y agoPlease tell me you are kidding! A search engine is easier than an encrypted messaging system? Seriously?
- sp332 11y agoYeah, I would think so. You don't even need user accounts.