Why an Apple search engine has a real shot at competing with Google | Hacker News Reader

Why an Apple search engine has a real shot at competing with Google

fastcompany.com

56 pointsproductceo30 comments

For the past year or more I've found Google's search site extremely unpleasant to use. It's results are choked with ads (like half of the page), and its search optimization heavily favors promotion of products, services, and brands. Unless that's what I'm looking for (and generally it's not) often I no longer can find what I'm looking for without repeated searches adding contextual clues, sometimes repeating the search 3 to 5 times. That's damned annoying, especially for a service that had none of these problems a couple years ago.

Lately I've been using DuckDuckGo and even Bing more. I can't say Bing has added much value, but Duck seems to fare about as well as Google for simpler searches while generating none of the spam. Maybe Apple can do this better still. If so, more power to Apple.

Frankly, I'd love to see the government step in and create a search engine as a public service that lets the user choose what emphasis they want when they search: commercial, non-commercial, regional, historic, etc. Since the WWW's arrival ~25 years ago it's become obvious to everyone how important web search is to EVERYTHING we do online. It's a primary window onto the world. To put that power entirely in the hands of one company, especially one who's lost its way as badly as Google (Do No Harm, indeed), is insane. It's time for search to become a public utility and adopt some basic design principles that serve the user as its primary mission. Maybe Jimmy Wales could offer some good ideas.

Another service a gov't-funded search engine site should provide is phone number lookup. It's absurd that there's no directory for phone numbers any more. Do we really WANT to obstruct people's ability to stay in touch with each other?

Would you trust the government to run a search engine so it can have direct access to your search queries?

Corporations already have it. I can’t imagine they’re more well-intentioned than a democratic government.

The problem is, with all the due respect, that intentions don't matter. You would have the same exact problem of misaligned incentives even with a 'democratic government' replacing Google.

If you really want the people to be in the loop, have the government regulate the business instead; at the very least it would be a transparent process.

You don’t have to imagine it. The Patriot Act section 215 gave the “well intentioned” US government the right to access library records as a general warrant.

If bing and duck can't do it, why could the government?

Public libraries serve the public good in the way I'm proposing: no search there yields any spam or "optimized" results that serve ulterior agendas or biases. A government service, especially one whose design and contents are fully open to scrutiny by any interested party at any time -- this would be a big win in terms of encouraging trust in that service, as Wikipedia largely does now.

No corporation will ever agree to serve solely that mission, especially under those constraints. Yet residents of an open democracy deserve nothing less -- open access to unbiased data. If ever the US needed such a thing, it would be now.

My strategy is to deprive Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple of as much personal data as I can.

So for search, I use various search engines - for generic search queries I turn to Yandex (A Russian search engine that helpfully provides an option in the bottom to search on Google and Bing, if you are not happy with their search results), Stackoverflow for programming queries, IMDB for TV / Movies, and even Wikipedia and Reddit for other types of queries.

This is easier to do now a days since Opera (pre-Blink version) popularised adding search from any site to the browser.

It's funny to try to push privacy in the domain of search. Part of the reason Google does as well as it does is that it spies on you like crazy -- not just to provide better ads, but to contextualize search results.

I know that HN users complain about it a lot, but I nearly always find what I want from Google right up top -- if it exists at all. Much of the time, I don't even have to type it all, because its suggestions are often spot on, and apparently based on what else I've been googling.

Maybe they can provide good-enough results without that. I know a lot of HN readers have talked up Duck Duck Go for getting good results without the invasion of privacy. But while Apple has also been selling privacy lately, its users also want extreme convenience, a system that doesn't do everything but does only what they want (or learn to want). That's where Apple has always shined, and it'll be tricky to marry privacy to a really good search experience.

A trick Apple currently plays with Siri and Maps is to keep personalized data on the local device, and factor it into results client-side. So my iPhone knows where I've been and what I've searched for, and can use that information, but it never ends up on a server. This is part of why they put such a big emphasis on their device-side neural chips.

That trick only goes so far though. I personally like to resume YT videos or gaming sessions when I switch devices.

I don't get this view. Controlling information dissemination is like, half of negotiation strategy. If the counterparty knows everything you know, you're basically always at their mercy. Seems like a lot of trust to give literally anyone and everyone.

>I don't get this view.

People like things you don't like.

People also like things they shouldn't like and which will hurt them or kill them.

So "people like things you don't like" is not the only option...

There’s no reason you couldn’t keep track of that information in encrypted form and sync it across devices. Apple already syncs bookmarks, email, browser tabs (albeit broken of late), photos, contacts, calendars, and probably many more things I haven’t thought of, across all of my devices.

One reason is that storage functionality isn't always bug free on all devices, and chasing long tail on all devices takes a lot of effort from the dev team.

Also think about TVs with small amount of flash with lifetime of 1000 write cycles, etc.

Apple currently earns roughly $10 / Active Devices for default search engine placement from Google. This excludes China for obvious reason, at an estimate of $10B pure raw profit. And this consistent income is the foundation of its whole Services Strategy.

Every two years these article pops up, going back as far as 2010 if I remember correctly. And I am now reasonably confidence it is one of those Apple tactics / submarine articles [1] in renewing contract with Google. Just like they did with Intel Modem, Qualcomm Modem, and Broadcom WiFi. ( Every two years Broadcom threaten to sell their RF / WiFi unit [2] to retaliate ) And of course if you dont you end up like IMG PowerVR or Dialog Semiconductor.

I mean I cant be the only one who notice this. It is getting old, repetitive and boring.

There is very little incentive for Apple to give up the $10B raw profit. They will continue to push Siri Search and Siri Suggestions with their own search engine while leaving the less lucrative search to Google. And in the name of privacy sending very little Data to Google. Basically Squeezing Google from all corners. So Google are now paying more for default placement, and getting less revenue per Ads. And to combat this Google put more Ads into their Search results, lowering the UX, which pushes more users to Apps and Siri Suggestions.......

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

[2] https://www.everythingrf.com/News/details/9456-Broadcom-Look...

They could promote their own service, charge Google more and seem anti trust because they made the competitor the default!

It would be a bit dumb for Apple to not have anything at least almost ready, just in case Google does something they can’t accept.

Google has dropped the ball on search results quality. Google no longer has their users' best interests at heart when it comes to ranking search results.

Users want relevant content. Content is the key word. Ads, pay/login walls and other "engagement" crap is not what users want.

Google absolutely could rank websites based on these factors and downrank websites with ads, etc. However, this would be at odds with their own business model, as unless they want to risk opening themselves up to antitrust actions they'd have to treat all ads equally, which means also downranking websites with Google ads and hurting their own bottom line.

Apple doesn't have this problem, and has the advantage of a "cult following" which means they'll get lots of users even if the product isn't that good (yet?) just like with Apple Maps, which in turn would encourage websites to comply with Apple's rules if they want to rank high and not miss out on those users.

> By defaulting to its search engine instead of Google on its devices, Apple will open itself to monopoly criticism from competition commissions in a variety of markets.

So if they use their non-monopoly share of the phone market to form a real competition against Google’s actual monopoly on search, that will be frowned upon?

Search aside, I just wish they would start promoting video podcasts as an alternative to YouTube.

The tech is already all there, just needs a gooder UI and paid delivery mechanisms.

Just imagine: No ads. You subscribe to a vodcast and the app automatically downloads new "episodes" for offline perusal as they become available, and they remain on device as long as you want them to, just like how current podcasts work.

Popular content creators could just manually embed ads or product placements in their videos, just like how some already do, or they could sell subscriptions at a price of their own choosing, or just accept Patreon donations etc.

Very curious if it will do something more than just 'query > present bunch of results as rows'.

I want to explore connections between links, semantic knowledge in a sane way.

Apple buying DDG could set them up for success

DDG is so heavily entrenched with Microsoft for results/ads that its entire business relies on it. Even if that contract could be unwinded to allow for an acquisition, the question is what IP could DDG offer to Apple that it can not build with reasonable effort (if not already build as part of Apple's search engine efforts)? There is also brand value, but a search engine with Apple's name on it would already have it. I'd argue that a much likelier acquisition is the one of Microsoft acquiring DDG.

In the long term Apple would indeed want to do that. The company policy for the past few years has been geared towards making a closed ecosystem. They would want to replace all Google services to make an iPhone to Android transition as hard as possible.

If Apple releases a search engine that was even half decent, DDG would be in big trouble. Most of DDG users would jus move to Apple because they have a better 'privacy' brand.

How they better? I never heard who uses iCloud Mail for privacy rather than ProtonMail. It's just a company that makes the best major smartphone OS for privacy (there are only 2 major OS in western world).

You're saying Apple has better privacy brand than DDG? I'm not so sure about that, I don't think most Apple users connect the brand with privacy at all while DDG's brand (while much less familiar obviously) is all about privacy.

It has to be Siri first if they want adoption - probably brand the thing as Siri.

Safari and Spotlight seem like more logical choices to hit the most people. Voice assistants are still super awkward and low bandwidth. They’ll hit all of the above though, I’m sure.

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