Jobs at Apple-Search
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Apple doesn't have that incentive; if anything they want to keep you in the App Store's curated experiences. Why send someone to an Open Street Maps website instead of one of the various OSM clients on iOS where you can get extra features via in-app-purchase?
It could benefit Siri making the built in web search more intelligent instead of leveraging a 3rd party API who might even charge for access since there's no ads.
It might even sell more devices if they make it an Apple device exclusive service, or at least as a gateway to lure new customers kinda like the online versions of icloud/pages/numbers/keynote.
1) an ad-free business model
2) control of Siri & Spotlight, the native search functions on a huge swath of devices
I'd say they have a fighting chance.
Unless they are paying Google a fortune to be the current engine, and rolling their own is cheaper. This seems unlikely.
The one where you make craptons of profits selling high-margin devices that come bundled with services that offer ad-free user experiences and maximum privacy.
And it's Google that pays Apple a fortune to be the current engine, not the other way around. Just to give you an idea of who holds the cards here.
There is a reason they take a cut of profits from App developers; it's to help pay for the cost of running the App store.
Edit: Clarity
Assuming you're right about their profits, that's 18B per quarter. Operating cost have been said to be around 5B per quarter for Google and 1.25B per quarter for Bing.
Bear in mind they're already running their own competitive map service for exactly the same reasons I say they want to run their own web search. And that's probably not cheap either.
iMaps already had a rollout that felt improvised and pretty crappy, if the Apple people were suicidal enough to get in a huge business they have absolutely no idea about, such as Web Search, I wouldn't expect a barely usable product in years.
"Google data centers cost the company more than $5 billion in the second quarter of 2014"
My source for the costs of Bing: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-losing-billion...
"Put differently, Bing is spending $5.5 billion a year to generate $3 billion of revenue." (I divided by four to get quarterly)
GPS data is not really on the same level as Web Crawl data. How often is a street added or changed versus a web page?
2. Even that bucket is a grab bag of other costs as well such as amortization of acquired assets (not necessarily for data centers). Additionally while web search is major it is certainly not the only thing that Google data centers do; for example they run Gmail and an AWS competitor on it. So it's very hard to determine just what the operational cost of web search is, but it's certainly well under $2.82B.
3. The Bing article clearly states its major cost increases are "costs associated with the Yahoo! search agreement and increased traffic acquisition costs", i.e. promotional not operational costs. This is not applicable to Apple, who already gets paid for traffic.
4. As for maps it's not just GPS data, it's road and signage and building data including visual imagery. That's many orders of magnitude more expensive to gather than loading a web page (even loading it 1000 times). You have to roll trucks and fly planes. In fact there was just a story yesterday about Apple rolling trucks to start gathering competing "streetview" data.. all from scratch.
What this all makes me think of is all the work being put into AI research lately. IBM, Google, Facebook, Baidu etc. There is a race to AI and the winner could very well make a better Google.
"For the full fiscal year, Apple generated $182.8 billion in sales, a new record for the firm, with $38.5 billion in net income."
$105MM, not $200MM.
Well, they are like double the market cap of Google, and (where it matters) they have astonishingly higher profits and revenue than it, to the point that it's like corner-store vs Amazon.
They clear ~$40 billion a year that they can use for whatever.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=AAPL+Income+Statement&annual
They use a lot of it to issue a dividend and buy back shares of the stock.
Apple likes to control all the parts of the user experience and search is going to get bigger every year.
He just asked "why would they have to make money", i.e. directly from search.
If you don't mean that by "otherwise", then we can also ask: "Why would they do Maps if it didn't make them money directly or otherwise?"
Why would they do
Google screwing with phones, Apple will screw with search. Apple isn't running out of money or smart people, so they probably have a shot if they want it.
Apple operates as though they do not have competitors, they only care about making the best possible devices they can, which is why they are so profitable. Chasing Google is the opposite of The Apple Way.
Apple has a very hard time attracting and keeping the best people, just like Google, Facebook, and everyone else. By definition the best people are always going to be scarce. Not everyone can be above average, and only a few can be the best.
There's a lot of military history that disagrees with you.
But just be totally happy if app discovery and search was even slightly less atrocious.
Besides web crawling almost seems quaint nowadays, they have other data they could better unearth or improve existing search functions.
Given the publicity, this may be a bluff by Apple. Yahoo did something similar. In early 2014, Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo was going to build their own search engine. Nothing happened. That seems to have been a ploy to get a better deal from Bing.
First hand or just based on trend?
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Add that to the fact that this is completely out of Apple's wheelhouse and their history of relatively never straying out of their circle of competence and it should be pretty clear that this isn't for web search.