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Comment by eight_ender | Hacker News Reader

Exactly this

There's nothing slow about this, it's already launched. I don't understand why people don't get this -- it even says so at the top of this page: "Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot"

I don't know why anyone would think that Apple would make a web page search engine like Google. Apple has already launched the Apple version in your phones integrated into the software you use.

Maybe because they are desperate for a different search provider than Google?

I don't use Siri or any assistant, so I don't seem to use what I'm being averaged into using. Majority opinion here is that Siri is seriously lacking behind the other offerings. Apple won't be oblivious to this. If it is solely due to their back-end search engine, then making that a public search engine website won't do Apple any favors if the results are truly that bad.

Voice assisted search probably won't give you much feedback. With a web based search engine, users provide feedback by ignoring some results and clicking others. Therefore releasing a search engine could help them improving it and deliver results with Siri that people would've clicked on otherwise.

Why would they be desperate for using another search engine when Google pays them $8 billion+ a year?

Because Google makes enough money on ads from Google search to spend $8 billion on making it the default search on iOS devices

Apple is mostly a focused company. There is no money in search except advertising and user tracking. Apple has already completely failed at advertising once.

Yes I realize that the App Store has ads and it is a stain that should not have ever happened.

Well they've gone to the effort to build a search index and they have sufficient market power to push millions of user onto whichever search engine they'd like. It's essentially leaving money on the table not to take the final step of popping a web frontend on it and making it the Safari default.

It already is the Safari default. As you type your search, it gives you a Siri Suggestion. When you type a query into Spotlight, you use it.

Apple isn't an ad-supported business. It's not going to look like Google. It looks the way it's already released.

They are going slow, though.

That they use their own search for this is not a big headlining marketing feature so they aren’t really evaluated on it.

I do think that’s a direct consequence of their experience with Maps, though I guess their hand was more forced on Maps and they had to tell the world about it.

However, using Siri and search suggestion they can, bit by bit, replace search results from other sources with their own without telling anyone about it. It’s a more careful approach.

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