I agree and I have been hoping Apple builds a serious competitor. I welcome any competition at this point. Let's be real, not many people are using bing. People _would_ actually use apple search.
Microsoft tried and failed to build a competitor and it's not like they have shallow pockets.
They grossly underestimated a number of aspects:
- The huge number of man-years invested in Google's search quality stack hand-tuning and what it would take to replicate it.
- The fact that the machine learning field was simply not ready to tackle the search quality problem.
- The infrastructure required to build a crawler / indexer stack as good as Google's
However, replicating the search quality stack is going to be very hard, unless someone makes a huge breakthrough in machine learning / language modeling / language understanding at a thousandth of the cost it currently takes to run something like GPT-3.
The most likely candidate to execute properly on that last bit is - unfortunately - Google.
I don't see it that hopeless. I feel it kinda is like starting Open Street Maps. It won't be perfect for a long time but there will be people who'd prefer it and help out.
Of course they would - it would be set as the default search on their iPhones with no clear-cut way to change it. You know, "security". The users don't know what's best for them, etc. as Apple seems to think.