Apple building search engine to take on Google, report claims
forbes.com
forbes.com
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.
Although what would Apple's model be? Have it as a sort-of loss-leader, a bit like their OS is effectively a loss leader for their hardware sales? That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
Is more of the cost burden on creating and maintaining the index or serving queries? Is it possible that serving queries to everyone would be worth it just to build the brand?
Arguably, and this would be an antitrust concern, IMHO, but they could serve ads... but only to non-Apple devices.
They also have app store search. So odds of it being ad free are zero.
If you mean replace any relevant search results for 'Android' with 'iPhone 12' and/or 'iOS 14', then yeah, that would be pretty egregious. However, I can't see that actually happening for a couple of reasons. 1) it would be so obvious it was happening that there's no denying it, 2) it would be so damaging that it would be a service killer as it's all anyone would talk about and never trust it
Also assumes the DOJ/ court systems/ legislation isn't going to block this kind of deal regardless.
(The press has been talking about an Apple search engine on and off for 5 years so I'm skeptical).
This is not a new idea - it was pretty much Google's original mission statement, ISTR.
Seems reasonable!
> That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
People performing actual searches has to be one of the lower cost factors of creating a search engine, at least for a long time. Unless it completely explodes, which I find very doubtful considering Googles position, and also considering Apples deep pockets, I don't think Apple will be in a big hurry to shut the gates. Additionally I can totally see Apple doing heavy integration with it's systems and actually using this potential search engine to upsell people into their ecosystem.
I could see them coming up with some sort of privacy friendly ad targeting system using on-device matching or differential privacy.
So they solve the privacy problem but there will still be ads (unless you buy their "Apple Ad Free Experience" service for $10 per month)
It's quite possible that DOJ antitrust action would prevent Google from paying to be a preferred search engine in the future. Once Google isn't paying you, why not provide your own search engine (and cut Google off from that valuable data stream)?
My prediction is that they will try to monetise this somehow. And the most likely way to do this is via some privacy friendly advertising model (or an ad/subscription hybrid). They're already doing it with Apple News.
I'm unsure as to whether they would seriously create a new ad platform, but a key tenant of the company's culture is not relying on advertising for revenue.
BTW their maps revenue from Google was a bigger share of total revenue when they gave it up than their search revenue is now.
Apple made over a quarter trillion dollars in profits in 2019 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income...), and gets somewhere around $10B from Google. (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/apple-services-success-story...)
They can certainly afford to ditch the partnership.
I dislike Apple. I'll never buy Apple. But Apple might just create the best search engine there is, with the right incentives.
Can you rephrase this sentence? There's a point you're making in this sentence that I'm not getting, and I would like to. Thanks
My bad.
I took the above information and hazarded an educated guess that Apple probably won't pivot into the ad business and attempt to compete against Google with a conventional ad-driven search engine. They might do that, but I think it's less likely.
The more I make use of the ads, the more I contribute financially (either directly or indirectly) to the bottom line of the content provider, the more I support them. So when I gloss over those ads without fully engaging with them, am I then committing theft as well?
Invoking a "moral" argument about theft here, begs the question, are ads themselves moral? When I read site X, I am not thinking "and as a nice side bonus, it would be cool if they could throw in a side bar making me aware of a miracle drug that will cure my insecurity by the size of my penis." The whole point of ads is basically to trick/deceive me into buying something I had no intention of purchasing originally. Is that not theft?
I know "two wrongs don't make a right", but since morality is relative these days anyway, when I enter a market place (which is what the ad driven economy is) where the whole point is a contest between will you trick me into buying this or not, I figure it's survival of the trickiest.
And that's exactly what I intend to do. If something is masquerading as free but uses that to actually sell my attention/trust to other parties, then I don't see why I can't masquerade as a client that's willing to be subjected to that but only takes the functionality. Make your cost upfront and clear and I will pay upfront and clear. If your business model involves a high degree of obscurity, my consumer behaviour will, as well.
Put it another way - is it theft to go to a company meeting where they serve pizza, just for the pizza?
If they want, they can require me to answer a question about the ads they served before sending me content. Or they can put EULA in front of their content.
There is a link at the top of this page.
How do I know whether it's riddled with trackers and obnoxious advertising based on that link? Yes, I can see it's Forbes so it's likely pretty bad. Am I supposed to keep an internal dictionary of link knowledge in my head for the hundreds of sites I interact with on a give week and "Vote with my wallet?" every time I click a link? That's ridiculous.
iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Maps, for instance, are all accessible from the web.
- As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
- As for Music, the web player is completely fine. Not any less optimized than the Apple device versions. Would actually go further and say it looks MORE optimized than the mess of iTunes/"Music" on the Mac. Apple's native music app on the Mac has never been good.
- As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it. Haven't seen a windows app variant either.
Edit: made it easier to read
Also, Windows lets you login into your iCloud account without the iCloud client, so you can still have your iCloud calendar (and emails) in the stock apps. I don't use the iCloud client because I don't use it to store files, but I still have my calendars and emails synced on my Windows desktop.
As for Maps, they don't really have a consumer facing web client, but they do let other websites embed Apple Maps. DuckDuckGo, for instance, uses Apple Maps for their maps.
You can certainly buy televisions that have built in support for 4K, HDR, and Apple TV.
>As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
You can access your calendar and all the rest of iCloud directly through any web browser. Including productivity apps like Pages.
>As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it.
DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead of Google Maps now.
For instance, when Apple Maps uses user devices to update it's map data like Waze does:
>“We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.
Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
It also enables Apple Ad tracking by default on iOS / iPadOS so please don't mix Apples' marketing with actual state of things in the world :/
Edit: Also, this is a lot of jumping to conclusions, Google can be used on any device, if Apple wants to compete, it will be usable on any device.
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."
2# Search is one of THE primary usage of the device, they have enough throwaway money to take this on. Just like Maps.
3# Sounds suspicious. But anti trust discussion started few years back and if you look through those optics EVERYTHING will look suspicious this year. There is no non-suspicious time for one of biggest companies in the world/human history to compete with each other.
The main cost of search is developing incredibly sophisticated ML algorithms for parsing search queries, for ranking results, and parsing web pages to provide factual results (like Google's snippets and knowledge base items).
And this is orders of magnitude more expensive than it was two decades ago. Because you've got to compete with Google which has a 20-year head start in throwing the best engineers in the world at these problems.
Nobody's going to use a search engine that isn't at least 90% as good as Google in these things. See: Bing.
All that was solved for majority of use cases and leaped ahead by Amazon in under 5 years with Alexa, deployed as tiny hardware.
Remove click tracking and top 1000 sites from Google and it will be shit, no amount of ML/AI dance will solve that. Apple can just do top 1000 sites from each country with click tracking (to track which result users are preferring) and significantly cut traffic sent to Google. They already try to do this with Siri.
Bing was chicken(user) and egg problem (click tracking to optimize results).
All click tracking does is measure the quality of your results -- whether a user clicks on the first result or third or none at all. It doesn't help generate quality results in the first place. Google's main first innovation was PageRank, not click tracking. Click tracking is just a metric to judge the underlying algorithms.
(There is one exception: it can be used to fine-tune the order of the top 5-10 results for the most popular queries, but of course most of search is in the long tail where that fine tuning can't be done. And in any case, you still need excellent candidates for your first 10 items to begin with.)
Click tracking does nothing for parsing a query, nothing for ranking the top 10 items out of a million matches, and nothing for extracting information.
And why are you talking about the top 1,000 sites? My whole point is crawling the web is the easy part.
Also no reason they couldn’t sell ads so long as they don’t use personalization, people almost forget that invasion of privacy and ads need not be coupled.
They could also use ads, just in a more subtle and privacy friendly way like the search ads (https://searchads.apple.com/ or previously iAd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd) in the App store already.
Apple's recent testimony before the House revealed that they have already spent Billions of dollars developing Apple Maps.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tech-antitrust/u-s-te...
What happens if the Justice Department finds Google has a monopoly, and somehow decides that Apple can't use Google's Search Engine anymore? I mean, it's a bit of a long shot and a weird idea, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. Google could get themselves into all kinds of trouble in this investigation.
If you're Apple, investing a few tens of millions now so that you have a half-decent search engine ready in case Google goes away is a smart investment. And if nothing happens, you quietly shelve the project.
I don't think it would happen like that. What might happen is that Apple users would be presented with the choice of what search engine they want to use.
It's like that on Android except Google Search and Chrome are already installed and the default, but you're presented with a choice of other search engines and browsers (might be a EU thing though).
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.
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
Of course, there are more complications than that simple figure, but it does provide a order of magnitude estimation.
Not necessarily. Firstly, you might not want to search the whole internet anyway, given how much clickbait spam, link farms, blackhat SEO, and whatnot there is now, thanks to the damage the advertising-driven search model has done to the internet. And secondly, there are alternative search funding models, e.g. subscription fee or listing fee. FWIW, that's the premise behind my side project - search just the good stuff, with no direct adverts, and result pages which contain adverts clearly flagged and heavily downranked.
Can you elaborate on this?
A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run
That doesn't mean the Search product category is inherently expensive; it means Google has more money than it knows what to do with.
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.
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.
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.
2015: 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.
Apple is not very good at its cloud offerings. Never had been.
Does it go down once in a while? Yeah, but so does GCP every now and then.
Edit: not a dig at engineers at Google who are crazy talented. In reference to Google as a company killing everything off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
>Some of the world's best cloud talent is assembling in an unlikely place: Apple
https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...
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.
(the previous thread for the changes to Applebot).
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).
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:
>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-17...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
If they are really privacy conscious, this would be the way to go.
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.
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.
Apple is a consumer focused company.