there are parts of Microsoft that are also very honest
For that matter there are even divisions within Google that want to do good stuff
However, Amazon, Facebook and 90% of Google are basically just the precursors of The Matrix now
Their ideal is that all people are mindless zombies, living on universal basic income, like vegatbles/animals, and spending all their money on AmazooogleBook
These days there are more attributes to add subtlety to your outbound links of you want the search engines to take you seriously.[1] I'm sure other search engines make similar judgements based on them.
[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en
(One could do this separately for various kinds of undesirable content and let the users choose whether they want to avoid spam, hate speech, plagiarized content, nsfw content, misinformation, Rick Astley videos, and so on.)
There's plenty of room for improvement in search. DDG is already edging ahead because it searches for what I want, not what it thinks I want.
While I largely agree with your impressions, I find it ironic to see Apple mentioned in that context. They are the third most valuable company on Earth, worth about $1.3 trillion: https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl...
Personally, I'd love if Apple put this out there ad-free. Getting clean, honest search results was why I switched to Google to start with. Google's current platform where almost all search results above the fold are paid for is what we switched to Google to get away from. DDG is piles better in this regard now.
That’s not to mention the desktop app - it’s a step change in performance versus Google Maps being a sluggish browser experience.
It just seems that Apple doesn't invest much in maps if they don't see a profit motive. They are very much capable of competing with Google Maps but they choose to build a more limited product that only works well in certain parts of the world where there are high concentrations of iPhone users. That's fine but it's not what I want in a maps app, I want consistency.
The main missing feature for me used to be public transit routing, but they added that a few updates ago and it generates pretty much identical itineraries to Google Maps.
Apple isn't a charity.
I don't necessarily expect this will be the case, I was just saying that I would very much prefer it. Apple doesn't charge for or have advertising on quite a few services so it's a crap shoot which way they will go. But if they want large-scale adoption, they need a big differentiation and zero adverts is a good start.
I do doubt Apple would launch a search page that is as buries organic results below the fold the way Google does now though.
For me, the clean look DDG sports is Apple's big competition at this point. If they don't deliver as-good-as-or-better results and interface as DDG, then I'll stick with DDG as my default (and Google as my "I can't find it on DDG" backup).
I'd love it if they made Apple Music and Apple TV free too.
They also offer content services like Music, TV+, and News+... services which they pay 3rd parties to use or develop content for. These are all quite distinct from Apple most other Apple services in that they are about the content someone else creates. Search definitely doesn’t fit into the same bucket as Apple Music and Apple TV+.
Apple News and the App Store itself are the only parts of Apple which get some revenue from advertising platforms.
If they see search the way they see maps, it could be free. It’s possible they will push an advertising platform with search. I don’t think it’s anywhere near a slam dunk though, and it’s possible it will have a small advertising load to support some costs like the App Store does.
Apple doesn’t need Search to be a profit center. They might put advertising on the platform (in fact I’d say it’s likely). But they don’t need it to look like Google’s pile of adverts with a few organic results at the bottom.
for me, if this follows the trajectory of apple maps, i will never have any reason to consider using apple search
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/26/apple-map...
Apple Maps used on iOS 3x as often as Google Maps, from 2015.
https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage-numbers/
I can’t source the 80% but it’s probably not far off that on iOS these days. Even so, Google Maps still has about 2/3 market share overall. It dominates on Android, and a significant number of iPhone users still use it. However for Apple Maps on iOS if it’s the default, it just has to be good enough and most people will stick with it.
The only way I can find (non-programming) information that is 50% reliable rather than 10% reliable is to append "reddit" to any queries.
And while DDG's front end was innovative 20 years ago when Google did it, it's pretty basic (which I love) and shouldn't be too difficult to copy.
The big challenge with search is the index.
Visualizations of results have improved so much in the last 10+ years, hopefully "visualization of search results" can also be advanced.
Take a look at the below search [0], it is distinctly different from the SERPs of the other search engines for the same query, but you are correct that we still focus on just listing information vs. visualizing it. Maybe something for us to explore.
From a search visualization perspective, check out Carrot2 [1] for something more innovative. Swisscows [2] also has some nice visualization elements.
[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=full+text+search+php
This is what I was referring to.