Apple's Siri seen cutting Google out of valuable mobile ad views | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Siri seen cutting Google out of valuable mobile ad views

appleinsider.com

46 pointsbretthellman25 comments

I have trouble taking this seriously.

> Arora noted that before buying an iPhone 4S with Siri, he was required to search for an Indian restaurant through Google's website.

Required? This guy hadn't heard of Yelp or Urbanspoon so he used Google for everything. Fine, nothing wrong with that. But how does one arrive at the conclusion that everyone else used Google to find everything?

> "Google would have made money if I clicked on any one of a number of advertisements for restaurants on the search page," he said. "Siri completely bypassed Google and went to a database called Yelp."

A database called Yelp. Ok. I cannot believe this AppleInsider crap is on HN. What a non-story.

To go on a bit of a tangent, what is it that compels people to want or need a rival? It seems like it's trendy to hate Google these days, and people just kind of assume that everything Google or Apple does is to spite the other one, and not to just make their own stuff better. I don't understand it. I understand that Apple and Google compete in certain areas but why do people outside these companies like to get behind one and hate others? It's really stupid and has going on for decades. Apple vs Microsoft. Linux vs Microsoft. Microsoft vs Google. Apple vs Google. Apple vs Samsung. It's beyond tired. Can we please just give it up?

Calm down. It's Saturday and you're reading a blog. This isn't a scientific journal bro. Chill out. This ain't for you to read you dig?

Telling them to shut up is like telling flame-war (language fanboys, LISP elitists, NoSQL followers) soldiers to go to church of pragmatism.

Ain't gonna happen.

I happen to love Apple, Lisp, and NoSQL. I also like Google, Ruby, JavaScript, Python, C, and consider myself pragmatic. Make what you will of that.

And yeah it's Saturday and I'm reading HN. I'm not telling AppleInsider to stop being AppleInsider, not sure where you got that from. I am talking to my fellow hackers here, making a plea for a little bit of sanity and discretion. (Sorry about my ranting, I tend to rant when I'm annoyed. I don't want to harsh your mellow but maybe my ranting ain't for you to read, bro. It's Saturday and you're on Hacker News you dig? This isn't Facebook, or a drum circle on the beach.)

Is it such a stretch to imagine that maybe, just maybe, Apple bought Siri because they thought it would make the iPhone more useful and not because they wanted to "kill" Google? I mean, why even post this drivel to HN? How are we supposed to have a moderately intelligent discussion about some ill researched and ridiculous claims made by some guy who hasn't heard of Yelp, and an informal poll of 40 people?

edit: And yes I'm aware that Steve Jobs had it out for Google. That doesn't mean that everything Apple now does has to be with the sole intention of hurting Google. If you think about how many people own a iPhone 4S in relation to how many use a PC of some kind then the idea that this minor dent in Google's search revenue is going to somehow kill Google is beyond laughable. I understand seeing this crap on AppleInsider, but not on HN.

"people just kind of assume that everything Google or Apple does is to spite the other one" <-- people are trying to apply a traditionalist business view to the field of technology, for which the concept of a zero-sum game manifests itself differently.

If you view google as a search company, rather than an AI company, then this drivel makes some sense

"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I'm going to destroy Android because it's a stolen product. I'm willing to go to thermonuclear war on this. They are scared to death because they know they are guilty." --Steve Jobs

The whole 'Apple vs Google' isn't something that was made up by the press. It is perfectly reasonable to look at actions of either company as potentially strategic moves to stop the other from gaining leverage.

Eric Schmidt takes it seriously.

> In relation to Apple as a competitor, Schmidt calls Siri a “significant development” and that its effectiveness as a search tool somewhat blindsided Google. http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/m0ywx/googles_er...

BTW: competition is part and parcel of business, always has been, always will be. I personally don't like it either - and it certainly doesn't "gratify one's intellectual curiosity." http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Actually, there's very little on HN these days that does. Most of it is "startup news and industry gossip". That's important for YC companies, but not intellectually interesting - if you want that, you've better off reading new scientist, r/technology, the weekend section of financial newspapers, theatlantic etc.

I propose two HN front pages: one for startup news; one for intellectual curiosity, with flag-like links + vote thresholds for moving a story to the other one. (yes, HN was once "Startup News")

I think this was always an obvious side effect of Siri. The more interesting question is how does Google provide a competitive solution without cannibalizing their own revenue?

If you're afraid of cannibalizing your current revenue you die. Apple's never been afraid of this in fact this is discussed in the Steve Jobs book. Example the iPad is eating into Mac sales and that's ok.

Indeed. That has been Microsoft's biggest weakness for several years now. Innovative initiatives are shut down because they threaten Windows, Office or both.

The Courier story is the most recent example but far from the only one.

You don't cannibalize your current revenue. You transform it. You create a complementary option and push people to evolve to it. That way you drive the innovation while (hopefully) controlling the phasing out of your older technology.

Yes, I do think that's the 64KB question. Forcing your erstwhile competitors to respond to your disruptive innovation is very powerful.

I see Amazon Silk as a similarly disruptive technology. The key is that both are cloud-based, revolve around highly valuable and personal customer data, and both attack Google at it's core: the gateway to web usage (Siri is a bit more ambitious).

"Arora noted that before buying an iPhone 4S with Siri, he was required to search for an Indian restaurant through Google's website."

Sometimes I wish I could downvote articles on HN...

Really obvious commentary here.

It's pretty obvious that Siri is a shift in how users interact with their mobile devices but I think it's a little naive to say "The business model of Google is at risk" as if Siri is some unstoppable force that no one can stop. It's pretty dang new itself and to assume that Google isn't working on or doesn't have the technology to do something similar (and profit off of it via adwords) is a little ridiculous.

What is to prevent Apple from taking Siri online and using it as a search engine to compete directly with Google?

That seems to be where they are heading with all this (that huge new data-center they just built starts to make sense too).

It wouldn't be competing directly with Google though, would it? Siri offers a limited range of functions (currently, though this will inevitably widen as Apple makes more modules (and possibly opens it up to third parties)) whereas Google indexes (almost) everything on the web and searches by text.

I agree though: due to its nature of remotely processing input, Siri could become a search engine accessed via a web browser assuming the computer has a mic (which most current Macs — especially the biggest-sellers, MacBooks — do). It would become a single interface for accessing dozens of services — like Wolfram Alpha and Yelp — and tapping petabytes of information.

No you're right, they are not ready right now, but they seem to be heading toward that collision somewhere down the road.

I was thinking mic would be necessary too but they would certainly have to have a fallback for machine's that lack that capability (aka, a text input box box). Apple could even do their spin on it and have the question spoken back to you after you enter it so Siri can 'hear' it (Apple has to spin it unique in some fashion similar to how Bing has a background picture distinguishing itself).

For some reason I didn't even consider that you could control it via normal text input, but you're obviously right as that's what Siri will eventually use after the voice-recognition software is used. This totally widens the possible market then, you're right.

I think the main bottleneck at the moment though (and why Siri was limited to the iPhone 4S even though the 4 and 3GS run it perfectly) is due to server load. They simply don't have the infrastructure to handle all the requests.

You can use voice searches with google.com right now. The fact that (I'm guessing) few people use it is probably a function of the fact that people aren't socialized to talk to their web browsers (while they are socialized to talk to their phones). So for the near term, I'd imagine that the Siri interface would make more sense for mobile than for the wider web.

For the first time it appears Google's web search could see a viable and strong competitor in Siri, especially if Apple acquires Quora and integrate Siri with Quora. I wrote about this here: http://nextgenui.com/user-exerperience/googles-pagerank-algo...

Even if all iPhone users start to use only Siri instead of Google, will Google really be in trouble? IOs have around 25% of the smartphone market. Is this number relevant compared to all users of Google in the world? (this is actually a question.)

We have a poll/conversation going here: http://hall.com/apple

Low information density on that page. Really do not need to see an activity stream of people I don't know voting Yes or No.

@benatkin good points. We're working on a iteration now to address.

Bretthellman, the badge that shows up when I visit the page is extremely annoying and indicates an impatience unnecessary and maybe even dangerous for the viability of your site. I would suggest let the visitors see at least a poll undisturbed and then decide by themselves if they want to give you their ID.

Thanks gsivil, I'm assuming you're talking about the enter your name lanyard?

I ended up pissing off a lot of hacker news users by commenting with a link so I went ahead and disabled the link given I can't edit my comment.

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