Key staff driving Apple search engine leave to rejoin Google
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
So Apple runs a lot of projects to better understand the item in question, its manufacturing and/or maintenance, customer profiles, and so on.
What I read in a headline like this is Search was one of those items Apple has been researching. They've probably decided it's not worth their effort. The staff have learned that, whether officially or through the grapevine, and are now going back to a firm where search is worth their effort.
The news for us is Apple sees no viability in search, at least not in how we've become accustomed to thinking about search.
I don't think you can read much about Apple's strategy from this. Apple might well see search as an important priority, they just don't feel spending the sort of money necessary to keep these particular people around is the best way to get there.
There’s a relatively well-known exchange where he flat-out tells an interviewer there’s no phone, and post-launch admits he was lying. The truth was in the middle - if they couldn’t control the product enough (due to then-standard carrier influence over design and experience), then they wouldn’t make a phone. Eventually they found a launch carrier that would let them do it.
If apple can’t make “the best search in the world” (by someone’s subjective definition), then they’ll never launch it. Simple as that.
Whereas Google will release something, get user traction and then try to make it 'best in the world'. If it doesn't get to world class status, then it cancels it and moves on, pissing off the early adopters in the process.
The problem is that this becomes counter-productive just like serial dramas in the TV world. If people think you're going to cancel something, they're not going to get emotionally invested in your product. Then it almost certainly gets canceled because it doesn't get enough user traction. Rinse. Repeat.
Though I suppose in that specific example at least, the people whose trust was damaged are mainly developers who invested in building for it, and probably less so users who invested in learning it or relying on it. Maybe there are better, more Google-like examples where user/community trust bears the brunt of it.
Sometimes there are no easy choices. My takeaway is that Apple wants its customers to be happy even at the expense of its employees, but Google wants its employees to be happy (product launch => promotions) more than it wants its customers to.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/executive-reportedly-fired-ap...
Alexa launched in 2014 and Google Assistant in 2016.
Siri has not always been ‘not as good as Alexa or Google’, it existed way before either of them were released.
In fact, the Siri Apple released was significantly gimped compared to the Siri that was available on the App Store before Apple bought it.
I’m at the point where I wonder whether they flagged me as a bad person, on which they make Siri do the opposite of what I ask.
I think The Information's intel is probably true — that Apple is years away from launching web search product — but I don't think that means there's been any loss of momentum. Building a generalized search engine better than Google is hard.
We know that Apple absolutely bristles at dependencies for core capabilities. For now they'll continue to begrudgingly take Google's $15 billion/year, but Google will not be the default search engine for iOS by 2030. I can understand core team members not wanting to wait that long.
And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
Just like with Google Maps / Apple Maps it doesn't seem very Apple-like to depend on a partner this heavily for such a core feature.
Apple will start using their own search tools in smaller places that they can monetize better, I suspect, things like "Siri find a good restaurant".
You're right, of course — most companies would be happy with a "perfectly fine" DDG-like offering. I'm presupposing that "best" is Apple's bar for an M1-like slam dunk launch, since an underwhelming launch (think Apple Maps 1.0) can be hard to recover from.
> And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
For sure! Moonshots require a level of faith that I'm not sure could maintain for a decade either.
Well Apple has been iterating Ax Series Chips, M1 is no different to previous A(n)X Chip. i.e M1 wasn't really a "launch" for the M Chip. And Search could easily have been something else in the mean time before a "Google" launch.
Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
Through an engineering lens, yes — one can look at the M1 SoC in a vacuum and characterize it as a logical evolutionary step in Apple's 20 years of silicon design. What made its introduction shocking (and its launch a slam dunk) is that Apple leveraged its experience in silicon design, OS design, hardware design, emulation, etc. to create new products, based on a completely new architecture for the desktop/laptop market, that definitively trounced their Intel-based predecessors.
You may have seen the clues before the M1 launched (which are crystal clear in retrospect), but for most people the unveiling of the M1 was as much a surprise as learning the identity of Keyser Söze.
> Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
Exactly! What will be "Apple Search" exists in a nascent state today, making its eventual launch as a branded product very analogous to the "develop secretly in plain sight" strategy Apple used for the M1.
Google maps had been a pain point coming from a pretty rural area, Apple does not have this problem.
Google still routes you to the middle of a cornfield there, and I don't know how to get that fixed.
There’s also no way to share a route with someone else.
https://www.apple.com/au/newsroom/2021/12/apple-rolls-out-al...
In Australia, I rarely go for Google Maps anymore. Apple Maps search and driving UI is cleaner, the LookAround streetview equivalent is great, and spoken directions are more natural. Google Maps still has the edge in business location data though - like finding “a barber nearby”. As more people use it, it’s clear Apple Maps is catching up there too.
But when I was in southern Europe, which I guess haven’t been upgraded yet, I found they’re a long way behind Google Maps in terms of routing, detail map data, and updates to business locations.
True, however, through a combination of advances of general tech/stack accessibility over the long term, and regressions in Google's feature set in search in respecting a user's specific query, and falling victim to its own SEO-anti-SEO cat-and-mouse, the thirst for a search input box that can respect the anything more than the very most basic "advanced options" grows. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the growing gap between "show me 10 links that have something vaguely to do with <str> that have been hyper-gamified with next-gen DL personalization" and "SQL for the whole internet". This feels like a ripe field for apple. Probably the hardest part would be branding. Apple search could imply just local or user-uploaded files. Apple web search sounds like it's for geezers. iSearch is too on the nose. Binoculars would tie it too much to Safari.
The internet is not for tinkerers any more, it's for regular humans with regular human interests. We had our brief, glorious time when the internet was for people who liked to know how things work. That time is over and I don't think there's much money to be made targeting that market in general search. The average person not only doesn't mind if they see listicles in their results, they often look at them!
Even some of their dongles were groundbreaking, like the lightning to hdmi video adaptor with a full ARM computer inside to compress and decompress the video stream in real time.
Like Maps, it's much, much harder than it looks. They have whole teams that concentrate on one particular vertical, and there are a lot of verticals.
That said: they're also heavily invested in solving problems of 15 years ago that have gone away. Someone taking a fresh look can probably do a lot better, but it would take enormous resources. It would make more sense to build "what Search is going to be" rather than "a better version of what's already been done."
For the public, web search is just text-mode siri/alexa
Definitely going to put this on my quote wall for later, thank you! I love seeing inspiring confidence.
I'm pretty sure this is a self inflicted injury. Google started relying on metadata as a signal for its search algo and the SEO war was on.
1. Nothing is forcing Apple or any other search engine maker to use the same signals
2. In any case, the era of general purpose web search seems to be ending - most things we care about is in walled gardens like Insta or WhatsApp. E.g., millions of people get their Ukraine war news from Telegram channels which Google is blind to.
Any general purpose search engine is hoovering up less and less relevant content
If you want to see how hyping products before they are fully mature can go wrong, look at Meta and Horizon Worlds.
Google has dozens of “VPs of engineering”.
P.S. According to levels.fyi (https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Bloomberg,Amazon&trac...) Google has only VPs and SVPs, not EVPs.
It doesn't, because there are so many of them. Looking at this for example: https://www.zippia.com/google-careers-24972/salary/vice-pres... I wouldn't say VP ranks very high at Google.
LOL. Many people have that title at Google, there is not only one.
[EDIT. Scrolling way down I see I was not the first to point this out. At least two of my friends have had that title at some point there. ]
I was amazed my first week when I, a lowly support drone, had a meeting THE vice president of Goldman Sachs. My boss laughed and explained...
$18B for not building a search engine doesn’t sound like a bad deal.
Odd.
Amusingly enough, later the same day this occurred, the product in question was featured in an ad banner on the App store.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
I hate it when a company hiring someone who used to work for a competitor is characterized poaching...
These are people with their own agency and the freedom to find a better situation if they can, and not the presumptive property of one company or another.
[Though in this case it's probably just perpetuating a search monopoly that is leading to a terrible user experience]
I'm mostly curious here if they were hired back by Google because Google genuinely wants their talent, or if they just want to deprive Apple of their talent. Poached isn't a great word, but there's difference in intent in behavior.
I wonder if this pedantic nonsense on HN is ever going to stop? "Poach" is a perfectly fine word to use here, everyone knows exactly what it means, and for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
It retains the implication of unfairly taking or appropriating something belonging to someone else.
Read every other definition on the page you linked.
Here are some more:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/poach
This one has essentially the same definition from your link. But notice the example usage: "They were furious when one of their best managers was poached by another company." Why furious? Because they feel someone took something belonging to them -- that is, the employment opportunity of person.
Here's another, where the most benign definition doesn't even make the list:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/poach
> for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
I'm not making an abstract point there. You must be unaware of the history of collusion between Apple and Google where they agreed not to poach each other's employees. There's your lack of agency. You can't choose an option that is withheld from you.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=poach
> To take or appropriate unfairly or illegally: poaching another firm's best employees.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach?q=...
> [ T ] disapproving: to persuade someone who works for someone else to come and work for you
Again, that is the negative tone which people don't like: the idea that it's somehow infringing on the company's property rather than individuals freely engaging in normal activities. Part of why people are sensitive to that is that those same companies illegally colluded to prevent people from taking jobs, with lost wages measuring in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This didn't just come out of nowhere but is something which is in recent memory and directly or indirectly affected incomes for many people in the tech industry:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
You’re on the right side of history, because it is a stupid and somewhat insensitive thing to say, but just be aware that many people will be caught off guard by how much it impacts you, since they just see it as a cute joke.
You mean companies like Apple and Google specifically conspiring to suppress wages and cross-company hiring? Yeah, I can't imagine why people who could be impacted by that would be bothered by reporting that suggested that type of behavior was warranted.
So things like this seems a lot more important to us than to gen pop.
And I was just trying to give a warning of that, since it is one of the key reasons why people like us are considered 'hard to talk to' (unless we take these warnings in stride and work to build coping mechanisms to lessen the impact).
This is a remarkable story in how much of it is devoted to the facts to allow the reader to draw conclusions. The author doesn't do much moralizing on the migration of expertise and IP, on hiring, and on the nature of competition between large tech corps. It's mostly a statement that Google/Apple/these guys were working on some project relating to search, then something happened, then something else happened, now they're at Google presumably doing Google search things, leaving the reader to wonder what's left of their efforts at Apple.
They wrote "With long and involved projects like search, it's not uncommon for staff to move between Apple and Google. In 2018, the same year Apple bought Laserlike, it also poached John Giannandrea from Google." when they could also have written "Another example in 2018 was John Giannandrea's move from Google to Apple." without insinuating malfeasance, ownership, a failure of loyalty, or anything that the word choice "poached" carries.
My literally point is that it’s not informative but rather a common-use term meaning “hired away from a competitor”
I get that it should mean more than that, but to most people it doesn’t.
Search does not require advertising.
Advertising is probably the simplest way to monetize search. Certainly other strategies could be tried, but that one at least is well understood, and nigh-ubiquitous.
It could also just be sold as a service, or an addition to iCloud+.
If there is an opportunity to increase revenue (subject to mission/values/etc), you take it. A decrease in another line of business doesn’t matter. Or an increase; you wouldn’t say “hey we’ve got this amazing ad opportunity but the AirPods business is killing it so let’s not bother.”
I guess the nuance here is that the business decision might be “our search, with our ads” versus “Google’s search, with their ads, plus $15B/year”. In that case I think there’s a reasonable argument that users are better off with Apple’s ads than Google’s.
If someone searches for "hotels new york" you have what's called a motivated customer. He or she is much more likely to click on an ad for New York hotels.
It's one weird trick, but man, is it a good trick.
edit: whoops