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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine. But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here. In practice I suspect this is really just google paying apple $15B not to compete with its golden goose.

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Apple did switch to Bing at one point. The default search engine in Safari is likely just a matter of money to them.

Apple already competes with Google in some search verticals, for example if you ask Siri to find a pizza restaurant, you will get an iOS pop-up with results that link to Yelp for reviews and Apple Maps for directions.

I don’t see Apple competing directly against Google in general-purpose search. But I could definitely see them expanding what iOS does “natively” to include Siri handling more queries itself rather than punting out to Google results.

Which is honestly super annoying on iOS Safari because if you want to highlight and search for something on a page you have to go to the lookup screen, which will almost always be empty, and then click the web search button.

do they have a deal with yelp? i wish i could swap out tripadvisor as the default for maps results

I wouldn't mind it if it didn't force me to install the Yelp app to see more details/photos. They must have some kind of deal.

Apple is rolling out their own reviews system so I expect Yelp and the other sources to be phased out in the coming years.

I dearly hope so. It's the only thing I don't like about Apple Maps.

It seems to be at least partially content-related, because I've seen both Yelp and TripAdvisor in Apple Maps.

Well Apple isn't exactly known for giving things away for free, so putting Yelp as the top-tier result in Apple Maps is a pretty good indicator that a deal was made.

Apple understands and knows how to build customer devices and products. They have no understanding of web and infrastructure. Building search engine is way beyond their competency as an organization.

I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.

... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it.

I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience?

Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.

> I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain?

Giant piles of money

> in terms customer experience?

This being the top concern doesn't really mesh with the game theory of google giving them $15B. If everyone believed UX was apple's primary concern, and that google was the best option, then google would not have to pay.

Unless it makes more than 15B for Apple in terms of being able to do something with their own search (advertising?), it is a loss.

Google is paying for Apple to not have the default be Google search. If Google wasn't paying, Apple would be able to offer the default search provider to someone else or make it a user selectable choice in the new phone setup.

Google is paying to keep Apple from thinking about their own provider or shifting the default to Bing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/297137/mobile-share-of-u...

Organic search from a mobile device is 60% of all Google searches. If we take the 50/50 breakdown for iOS vs Android and apply it there, 1/3rd of all google searches are from iOS.

That's what Google is paying for - making sure that people who don't care about their search provider continue to make up 1/3 of all of their searches (and data gathering).

The next thing to consider back on that "what would the expense gain" ... does Apple have the resources to spin up a 1/3 google data center. I mean, yea they do... but that's expensive and if they aren't selling adds, it is purely an expense.

I tend to expect Apple would easily make 15B on searches just doing keyword relevance without any tracking

That would be very cuil.

Apple could buy duckduckgo to go along/try to regain their privacy branding. Yea, duckduckgo has a lot of work to do to get to google level(afaik they're just a bing skin atm), but it'd be a decent start.

I doubt they would want to buy a search engine that heavily relies on Bing.

They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them learning about them and eventually dominating.

I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one. They have built a position on customer privacy and moving into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.

They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.

That’s fair, fortunately those don’t matter as much.

It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all the money in the world, and yet their online services suck.

Those are very different worlds, that require organizations built in very different way.

Apple has so much money that they can be whatever they want to be. Didn't they say they have around $200B of cash on hand earlier this year?

[1] says $204B around April time, yep.

[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-every...

Google search sucks nowadays anyway comapared to 20 years ago.

right. it does. besides, Google paid since initial release of Safari when Cupertino had decided what the final design/functions of Safari were going to be -- seems many forgot about that as well as where and when Goo blunt and boldly went headhunting for new staff and peeps in p2p underground in the days Carracho was about to become -- very briefly -- a much fancied p2p-client

Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs. It is a matter of brute work basically, an army of programmers. CPU design is a lot more sophisticated.

Not really. The vast majority of CPU design is just logic in Verilog/VHDL, similar to software.

> Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs

Not for Apple - they have hardware excellence in their DNA, but the web and internet services aren't a core competency (yet?). They have made huge strides from the disaster that was MobileMe, but they are nowhere close to where the Bing or Google search teams are.

> hardware excellence in their DNA

Yes, thats why my $4000 macbook pro keyboard inserts double keys strokes on 50% of key presses. The excellence must all be in the magic touchbar that periodically stops working so I cant even use vim because the ESC key is on a broken touch screen.

...and that's their wheelhouse. Now imagine how much of a shitshow MobileMe really was.

> But I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine and uses that as the default here

I think this is even more outlandish than switching to Bing.

Google Search accounted for $100B in revenues. iOS has ca. 14% browser market share. Assuming that mobile users search as much or are as valuable as desktop searchers, then that suggests iOS users generate ca. $14B in revenue. Of course, it's likely iOS users are more valuable than the average Google user, but it gives a rough run of the numbers.

Google is happy to pay all of this revenue back to Apple so that they don't suffer indirectly in other parts of the business by having an Apple competitor or with Bing as default.

Apple on the other hand needs to generate this value from a standing start. It's difficult to see how they'd feasibly get to > $15B net monetization on such a massive and risky undertaking.

I really think you underestimate how hard it is to "roll a search engine" the size of Google or Bing. Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

No offence but I think you’re wrong. Apple could buy Duck Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it good enough or do the first search on the default search engine.

Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal directly with Microsoft? It’s not like Microsoft won’t know Apple bought Duck when it’s time to renew the contract anyways.

Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names

I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing and Google's search engines and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing, and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple.

They could buy another search engine, but again getting Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still honestly a massive project.

I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on other things.

I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one) but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with the results and try the query on Google, it's no better there.

Are you sure you don’t have predisposition to that conclusion?

> and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine.

I'm curious, can you share which one?

I remember recent conversations (in June) about search engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_ DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to “tank man” (not the imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with it). That highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might have delegate or contract some aspects of it.

It’s not like Apple to not control everything, but they could do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on top of that, but is based on Bing.

Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time sounds like a massive win to me.

I think with billions of dollars in funding they could accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally. They don't need to be as good as google.

Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware.

Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your customers find your software inferior.

Safari would be evidence against this.

I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?

Google managed it 20 years ago.

Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space. (Estimating from Moores law.)

Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a technical perspective.

> Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683

You can safely assume that for any critical external dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.

It doesn't have to be by default. Like many other preferences Apple asks when it pushes a new version of iOS or macOS, why couldn't this be a choice for users?

A valid point, but I wonder how effective Apple's search engine will be with their stance on user privacy. I'm sure Apple is perfectly content with letting Google do the dirty work.

I don't think there's risk of apple building a successful search engine that can compete with Google, but just paying for Mac users who are not savvy enough to change their default browser to Google. (or bribe against going with Duck.com)

DuckDuckGo is pretty good, is all about privacy and they don't have way less ressources as Apple. But we saw how the launch of Apple Maps was not perfect, so maybe it's easier and better for them to accept the $15B.

DuckDuckGo is literally Bing with some privacy features.

>DuckDuckGo is literally Bing

How so?

In that DuckDuckGo gives your search terms to Bing (I think they also had a deal with Yandex for russian queries, not sure if that's current) and receives the search results back and displays them. (adding its own quick results and ads)

Oh, I see. Thanks.

I think that's simplifying it greatly. Here's their help page:

https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

They have their own crawler as well, and there are a bunch of other sources depending on what you're searching for. Bing results are probably a larger part of it at the end of the day, but it's not quite as you are alluding to.

To me that page always reads as if it tries to play up their own contribution, which until there is more detail makes me suspicious if the main results are meaningfully influenced by them, or if it's "just" infoboxes etc.

Maybe, but I also think basically saying "well, it just spits out Bing results" is over simplifying. There's probably somewhere in the middle, as I said, I suspect Bing results are a pretty large chunk of it but I also try not to just hyperbolically state things ya know?

I don't believe "it's bing results with added extras around them" is hyperbolical, given how similar DDG and Bing results look everytime I try it. If it's wrong, DDG would IMHO do themselves a favor by sharing more details here.

Surely someone out there has a paper on comparative search engine results.

That page is intentionally misleading. They list crawled websites as 'sources'.

If DuckDuckGo claims to have over hundreds sources, then Bing and Google have over billions of sources by the same definition.

I tried to switch to using DuckDuckGo and found it basically unusable. Essentially the same quality as Bing. Maybe slightly better, but not by much.

That's because DuckDuckGo is essentially a reskin of Bing search. They don't do their own indexing save for a few token websites.

I want a search engine that returns results solely on the terms of the query. I'm so tired of search engines thinking they know what I want to see based on my history. Not only do I question the validity of the results when they are so subject to change, I also worry I'm missing something.

"Hey, Google, what can I use to replace white bean paste?" "Hoisin sauce is a great replacement for white bean sauce!"

"Hey, Google, things have gone weird in macOS 12, how fix?" "MACOS 4 was RELEASEd in 1912 AWKWARDLy with A spanner"

I get that search is a hard problem but they are spectacularly bad at it for being the best.

Didn’t this already happen at one point? At least for Siri results I know it did. I feel like it happened on Safari too but it might just have been Siri results.

[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/231133/apple-takes-another-step-aw...

I remember this! You'd ask Siri to search for something, and you'd get back Bing results. I thought it was odd because I had never (at the time) used Bing for anything at all.

That said, I haven't used an iOS device in some time, and didn't know if that ever changed to Google or another service(Siri search results).

> I don't think its outlandish at all to imagine Apple rolls its own search engine

IMHO, that's the play behind Neeva[1], to be acquired by Apple. But will Apple give up the sweet, sweet $$$$$ it gets from Google, just to roll its own?

[1] https://www.neeva.com/

Destroying Google dominance in search market will thoroughly damage the company, reducing it to a husk of its former self. This would enormously weaken Apple competitor, strongly improving its market power. It’s most definitely worth to Apple more than $15B/year, as long as they can pull it off, and can avoid antitrust.

> I don't think there's a world where apple switches to bing for its default search engine.

For a long time Siri searches were powered by Bing.

And it's additional $15B R&D fund for Apple to improve its own search system that I can't imagine it's been developing for many years now behind the scenes.

I wish Apple would roll their own- free of ads. But hey- $15B is a lot of money.

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