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The money doesn't come from search quality, it comes from selling ads and Apple is a long way away from building up ad inventory and an ad salesforce like Google's. They absolutely are making money on ads today, but they're a long way from swapping out Google.

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Yeah, I suspect part of it is keeping an emergency option if Google were to not only stop paying them but actively blocking them (it's unlikely to happen, but if you have infinite money you're going to be paying to reduce unlikely risks).

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".

There’s plenty of other search engines eagerly waiting to take googles space on ios, should google decide to block ios users

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