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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting.

A while back, I think either Cook or Jobs mentioned that Apples makes PRODUCTS and doesn't sell ADS.

If that's true (and stays true) AND this is the beginning of a search engine for them, it's going to be VERY interesting to see what it looks like.

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FWIW, an Apple recruiter approached me about working on a new Search-related thing. He used the following enticement in the initial email: "We are building the future of search for the best user experience (unadulterated by advertising for the first time in history)." So as best I can tell, a search experience without advertising is very much on their mind.

Hey, I don't think it's appropriate to post publicly information that somebody divulged to you in confidence.

I don't think recruitment spam really counts as "in confidence." Certainly he's under no NDA. I guess some might consider it rude, but I wouldn't.

He said it was the recruiter's initial e-mail. If someone e-mails you out of the blue with details like that I think you're more than allowed to tell others about it.

I don't think email is considered confidential by default. Had this recruiter made any confidentiality request, I would have tried my best to honor it. Instead, he seemed more interested in spreading the word that they were entering the search game. Also, Apple has not been exactly hiding their growing interest in search. They rarely let their engineers speak in public, but they were on stage this year at Lucene Revolution giving a number of details about how they are using Solr.

It's not clear-cut, that's for sure. I just wanted to post a different perspective.

Thing is, if you asked the sender for permission to post pieces of their email, they'd probably say no. It seems a bit gauche to say posting is okay because "nobody told me not to."

It's a good point and since journalists are already asking about it, I now wish I hadn't even posted it. I think Apple is not trying to hide the fact that they are looking for search and machine learning people, but the press will surely get it wrong trying to triangulate a vague one-liner from a recruiting email.

Apple already sells ads, and in fact restricts some technology to advertising partners. WebGL, full screen ads etc. They also have a patent on unskippable ads.

I don't know why people don't treat statements like that with enough cynicism.

They made iAd so they would control the major advertising network on iOS and as a result could limit the privacy implications. iAd is by far the least intrusive major advertising network.

WebGL is no more restricted technology in iOS 8+. Btw it was restricted only in Safari.

Sure, but I find it quite unfair to say Apple doesn't sell Ads when they not only own their own exclusive Ad network, they control their entire platform, own many ad related patents and actively restricted access to new technologies to their advertisers in order they could outcompete anything else on iOS.

They don't outcompete anyone on iOS. Advertisers hate iAds because they don't have as much access to user data as they do with Adwords etc.

I think this is more about AI and offering you answers to questions like Siri does... It will not list any links. Launching a new search engine has no benefits for Apple from my point of view.

This is more into AI than Ads. AFAIK Siri uses Wolfram Alpha for its answers. Given the way Google's knowledge graph is advancing, it totally makes sense for them to build their own AI engine.

Google Knowledge Graph is based on Freebase.com. Google shut it down, last month. IBM relied on Freebase for Watson, so they acquired Blekko last month, a real web search engine & knowledge base startup. Microsoft already owns Powerset company that powers their Cortana. Apple needs a up-to-date knowledge base too, currently they rely on WolframAlpha and Freebase, afaik.

Shutting down Freebase was a big hit for many projects in the AI space, Freebase had 2,903,361,537 facts in comparision Wikimedia's Wikidata has just 13,924,224 facts - that's still a huge difference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Graph , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blekko , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powerset_(company) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Vault , http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/27/ibm-acquires-web-crawling-...

I'm assuming you are remembering Cook's open letter on privacy http://www.apple.com/privacy/

"Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers."

This obviously is not saying Apple doesn't sell ads. It's saying their core business model is selling products. The users are not the product.

Note does it doesn't say they don't build any profiles at all, or use your behavior for their own purposes, or that they don't collect data. It is in fact, very likely they do use profiles of their users for internal purposes, even if just for improving those services.

It does not say they don't collect data thought. And I'm pretty sure not even Google sells data to advertisers, they sell ad space. It's just a PR stunt.

But Apple does sell ads...

And while I would love a privacy focused search engine, I just don't think you can build a good one without private data.

iAd Advertising with Apple http://advertising.apple.com/

As others have commented, I have fears about iAd. I hope Apple will refrain from that business completely.

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