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Previous thread here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24290613
I would love to see Apple build a search engine just as a feature for their products rather than something to stuff to the gills with advertising and make money from. That would completely change the incentive structure. Apple would be much better positioned to make search better for users instead of the conflict of interest Google has (redirecting users toward ads).
I would love to see search get back to what it’s meant to be: information retrieval. Help users find what they’re looking for, not what Google wants them to find.
> _"I would love to see Apple build a search engine just as a feature for their products rather than something to stuff to the gills with advertising and make money from. That would completely change the incentive structure. Apple would be much better positioned to make search better for users instead of the conflict of interest Google has (redirecting users toward ads).
I would love to see search get back to what it’s meant to be: information retrieval"_
Although what would Apple's model be? Have it as a sort-of loss-leader, a bit like their OS is effectively a loss leader for their hardware sales? That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps, so it wouldn't be uncharacteristic for Apple to sell usage of it's search API to other companies, and compete with Bing and Yandex in that market.
Is more of the cost burden on creating and maintaining the index or serving queries? Is it possible that serving queries to everyone would be worth it just to build the brand?
Arguably, and this would be an antitrust concern, IMHO, but they could serve ads... but only to non-Apple devices.
That anti-trust concern could easily be wiped out by giving non-Apple devices the chance to opt-out by paying a flat-fee of maybe 100$. Then they can say that Apple devices include this upfront cost already (which they kinda do, since they are ridiculously overpriced).
Considering the large amounts of money Google pays Apple to be the default search engine we are talking about one hell of a loss leader.
15-20% of net income. No way they will ditch that.
They also have app store search. So odds of it being ad free are zero.
Plus 'Get the new iPhone 12 Pro!' and intercepting android device search queries. Can rapidly become not a loss leader.
Depends on what you mean by "intercepting". You can do that now on Google AdWords if you're will to out spend anyone else for those keywords like 'Android'. In that instance, all it means is that an ad for your product appears when someone searches your rival. In fact, I'm pretty sure this SOP for marketing teams.
If you mean replace any relevant search results for 'Android' with 'iPhone 12' and/or 'iOS 14', then yeah, that would be pretty egregious. However, I can't see that actually happening for a couple of reasons. 1) it would be so obvious it was happening that there's no denying it, 2) it would be so damaging that it would be a service killer as it's all anyone would talk about and never trust it
You are assuming this would be operated at a loss. Apple could sell their own advertising. Or if it's good enough, just use it to make the iPhone experience better. Ad free search would be a pretty nice feature if results are top Q.
Also assumes the DOJ/ court systems/ legislation isn't going to block this kind of deal regardless.
(The press has been talking about an Apple search engine on and off for 5 years so I'm skeptical).
> Have it as a sort-of loss-leader, a bit like their OS is effectively a loss leader for their hardware sales?
Seems reasonable!
> That would of course suggest a search that would require Apple hardware.
People performing actual searches has to be one of the lower cost factors of creating a search engine, at least for a long time. Unless it completely explodes, which I find very doubtful considering Googles position, and also considering Apples deep pockets, I don't think Apple will be in a big hurry to shut the gates. Additionally I can totally see Apple doing heavy integration with it's systems and actually using this potential search engine to upsell people into their ecosystem.
Same as Maps etc. With their phones etc they are in the business of building a personal digital assistant. If they managed to couple search with a decent ontological model of the world, they might be able to build something quite special. "Search" is one, rather simple application for the knowledge they are spidering.
This is not a new idea - it was pretty much Google's original mission statement, ISTR.
“To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” is Google’s current mission statement.
The difference is that Google funds that search engine by ads and the only reason Apple's engine would be worth using is to reduce the ads, which means raising the price of Apple's already expensive products, or giving away profit.
Apple funds the search engine by selling more hardware product. It sells more hardware product by doing things well - including search
How likely is it that Apple would relinquish those 15% to 20% of their profits that are now coming from Google? Not very I would guess.
I could see them coming up with some sort of privacy friendly ad targeting system using on-device matching or differential privacy.
So they solve the privacy problem but there will still be ads (unless you buy their "Apple Ad Free Experience" service for $10 per month)
On the other hand Apple might happily accept those payments for now, but realize that they won't keep coming forever.
It's quite possible that DOJ antitrust action would prevent Google from paying to be a preferred search engine in the future. Once Google isn't paying you, why not provide your own search engine (and cut Google off from that valuable data stream)?
Or Google turns sates evidence and blames that nasty monopolist Apple for extracting the Vig from them, and suggests that Apple must have a ballot in Mac OS and IOS a bit like MS
Given that Google also pays Mozilla about the same amount, it would be hard to prove that Apple's "extracting" it from them. Google very much wants to be able to pay all the browser makers to be the search engine of choice. Nobody has to extract anything from them.
Absolutely, but I really doubt that Apple will just shrug its shoulders about the lost profits and throw in an ad-free search engine for the price an iPhone.
My prediction is that they will try to monetise this somehow. And the most likely way to do this is via some privacy friendly advertising model (or an ad/subscription hybrid). They're already doing it with Apple News.
> unlike Google, it’s not reliant on advertising income, which benefits from personalized data with which to target users.
I'm unsure as to whether they would seriously create a new ad platform, but a key tenant of the company's culture is not relying on advertising for revenue.
Except the massive revenue from Google ads via Google.
These payments have been under increasing scrutiny from trustbusters the past few years. It's not gonna keep flowing.
They did exactly this when they ditched Google Maps, turning down billions of dollars in revenue, spending billions of dollars to build out their own service, simply to prevent Google harvesting Apple user location data.
I don't think Maps is anywhere near as profitable as search.
That’s true, but it doesn’t mean Apple
won’t or can’t do the same thing with search as they did maps. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but they do have a track record of doing right by their users.
BTW their maps revenue from Google was a bigger share of total revenue when they gave it up than their search revenue is now.
Pretty likely, i mean it stands to reason they'd make more in the long term without a middle man.
_edit: I misread a thing._
Apple made over a quarter _trillion_ dollars in profits in 2019 (
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267728/apples-net-income...
), and gets somewhere around $10B from Google. (
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/apple-services-success-story...
)
They can certainly afford to ditch the partnership.
That was pre-tax income. Apple's profit for 2019 was $55 billion.
You're right. Ack.
Given which, it's interesting this was announced now - just in time to _conveniently_ give Google a hotline to a "See! Not really a monopoly!" defence.
I believe you confuse revenue with profit
How much money would ads that are broadly targeted (city, gender, age bracket) like Google used to, be able to make relative to the uber personalized Google/Favebook ads?
Yeah, great. A search engine that will somehow require me to buy Apple hardware.
A very, very small amount of your search queries would be even tangentially related to Apple. Right now, Google has all the incentive of directing traffic away from quality websites and onto pages that fit their plans. AMP gets promoted to reward publishers who publish content in a strict Google -flavoured format. Pages with Google ads can be promoted if Google detects good ad engagement in them. Websites are totally diluted with ridiculous amount of useless blabla become SEO is the way. Just try to find _any_ recipe these days. Virtually all pages make you scroll through 50 paragraphs of foreplay before the actual content appears.
I dislike Apple. I'll never buy Apple. But Apple might just create the best search engine there is, with the right incentives.
Interesting, right? I wonder who actually reads all this filler material. If I can't seem to find what I was looking for on a website within one or two seconds I click back and check the next one. If everyone would do that, sites that organize their information like an attention blackhole, would very soon disappear ;(.
> Websites are totally diluted with ridiculous amount of useless blabla become SEO is the way.
Can you rephrase this sentence? There's a point you're making in this sentence that I'm not getting, and I would like to. Thanks
At least it gives you the option to choose. Some people will be more willing to pay directly rather than endure ads.
Some people just use adblock.
Ad-blockers can only remove content you don’t want to see. What they can’t do is get Google to show you the results they’ve buried on page N because they’ve reinterpreted your query in order to steer you toward popular, commercial sites that happen to be Google’s partners.
Why do you think Apple would not do that?
We don't know. What we do know is that Apple generates their revenue from hardware sales, App Store commissions, and subscriptions to their music and tv services. Google generates most of their revenue from ads.
I took the above information and hazarded an educated guess that Apple probably won't pivot into the ad business and attempt to compete against Google with a conventional ad-driven search engine. They might do that, but I think it's less likely.
We simply don’t know.
Will Apple let me see website that "replicate iOS's built-in functionality" or fail review, or don't pay a $100/yr listing fee?
And some people consider that theft.
The company has the option to stop providing their service to users who use adblock. And they have decided not to do that. If they don't have any issue I don't see why I should have any issue using adblock either.
That implies any kind of honest transaction took place first.
Y'all are jumping through some serious mental hoops. Nobody on HN can claim to be naive enough not to understand the ad model of financing content, so ad blocking IS essentially theft. Avoid the content if you find the means of paying for it objectionable; vote with your wallet.
I don't follow this argument. Let's pretend I was using a "normal" browser with no extensions. Would I then face the moral dilemma of how long to look at the ads? Or how often to click on them?
The more I make use of the ads, the more I contribute financially (either directly or indirectly) to the bottom line of the content provider, the more I support them. So when I gloss over those ads without fully engaging with them, am I then committing theft as well?
Invoking a "moral" argument about theft here, begs the question, are ads themselves moral? When I read site X, I am not thinking "and as a nice side bonus, it would be cool if they could throw in a side bar making me aware of a miracle drug that will cure my insecurity by the size of my penis." The whole point of ads is basically to trick/deceive me into buying something I had no intention of purchasing originally. Is that not theft?
I know "two wrongs don't make a right", but since morality is relative these days anyway, when I enter a market place (which is what the ad driven economy is) where the whole point is a contest between will you trick me into buying this or not, I figure it's survival of the trickiest.
> vote with your wallet
And that's exactly what I intend to do. If something is masquerading as free but uses that to actually sell my attention/trust to other parties, then I don't see why I can't masquerade as a client that's willing to be subjected to that but only takes the functionality. Make your cost upfront and clear and I will pay upfront and clear. If your business model involves a high degree of obscurity, my consumer behaviour will, as well.
Put it another way - is it theft to go to a company meeting where they serve pizza, just for the pizza?
When I look back at my life and think of the number of times I've taken a bathroom break during live TV commercials, or fast-forwarded commercials on my VCR, or switched to another radio station when commercials came on, it's a wonder I'm not in jail.
Why is it theft to block ads I didn't agree to see, but not theft for them to send ads I didn't agree to receive?
If they want, they can require me to answer a question about the ads they served before sending me content. Or they can put EULA in front of their content.
> Avoid the content if you find the means of paying for it objectionable; vote with your wallet.
There is a link at the top of this page.
How do I know whether it's riddled with trackers and obnoxious advertising based on that link? Yes, I can see it's Forbes so it's likely pretty bad. Am I supposed to keep an internal dictionary of link knowledge in my head for the hundreds of sites I interact with on a give week and "Vote with my wallet?" every time I click a link? That's ridiculous.
Apple will probably also demand a 30% cut on everything that can be purchased after found via their engine. Google will then follow suit because the cool kids are doing it.
Why is this such a heinous crime? You are not required to do anything.
Aren't you jumping to conclusions a bit here? Google search doesn't work only on Android and Chromebooks. I don't see how Apple would benefit from locking it down to their own devices.
I'm not sure why you think this is so.
iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV and Apple Maps, for instance, are all accessible from the web.
All of these services are severely limited, crippled and provide worse experience if you don't buy Apple hardware.
How is iCloud, music, tv, and maps crippled? I haven’t used it on non macOS or iOS machines so I am curious.
As someone who has used tv on non-Apple devices I can say it works completely fine. It doesn't stream 4k like it would on apple devices, but it works fine.
- As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
- As for Music, the web player is completely fine. Not any less optimized than the Apple device versions. Would actually go further and say it looks MORE optimized than the mess of iTunes/"Music" on the Mac. Apple's native music app on the Mac has never been good.
- As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it. Haven't seen a windows app variant either.
Edit: made it easier to read
It might just be me, but Apple TV on the web is extremely slow and buggy.
Also, Windows lets you login into your iCloud account without the iCloud client, so you can still have your iCloud calendar (and emails) in the stock apps. I don't use the iCloud client because I don't use it to store files, but I still have my calendars and emails synced on my Windows desktop.
As for Maps, they don't really have a consumer facing web client, but they do let other websites embed Apple Maps. DuckDuckGo, for instance, uses Apple Maps for their maps.
> As someone who has used tv on non-Apple devices I can say it works completely fine. It doesn't stream 4k like it would on apple devices, but it works fine.
You can certainly buy televisions that have built in support for 4K, HDR, and Apple TV.
>As for iCloud, their Windows client is a little lackluster. For example, the only way they can sync your iCloud calendar on Windows is by creating an Outlook plugin. So the only place I can view my iCloud calendar on my Windows computer is on the Outlook app.
You can access your calendar and all the rest of iCloud directly through any web browser. Including productivity apps like Pages.
>As for Maps, I don't think I've ever seen a web based version of it.
DuckDuckGo uses Apple Maps instead of Google Maps now.
iClouds calendar and contacts used to just be CardDAV and CalDAV. Has that changed?
It still uses CalDAV (not sure about CardDAV), it is just difficult to get the URLs as it involves watching network requests on the iCloud webapp.
How would a search engine be "severely limited, crippled, and provide a worse experience" when used from a web browser?
what if search engine will require you to sign-in with apple ID
Apple pretty famously goes out of it's way to not collect that sort of privacy busting user data in the first place.
For instance, when Apple Maps uses user devices to update it's map data like Waze does:
>“We collect data — when we do it — in an anonymous fashion, in subsections of the whole, so we couldn’t even say that there is a person that went from point A to point B.
Neither the beginning or the end of any trip is ever transmitted to Apple. Rotating identifiers, not personal information, are assigned to any data or requests sent to Apple and it augments the “ground truth” data provided by its own mapping vehicles with this “probe data” sent back from iPhones.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/29/apple-is-rebuilding-maps-f...
> Apple pretty famously goes out of it's way to not collect that sort of privacy busting user data in the first place.
It also enables Apple Ad tracking by default on iOS / iPadOS so please don't mix Apples' marketing with actual state of things in the world :/
What do you imagine that does?
Why is that a problem? You're not being forced to use it, I'm sure it will integrate beautifully into their systems, which is what Apple products are meant to do. If you don't like the ecosystem, don't use it.
Edit: Also, this is a lot of jumping to conclusions, Google can be used on any device, if Apple wants to compete, it will be usable on any device.
And use safari :)
Fee-based search engine could work for Apple. Free for first year of purchase of device. Rolled into iCloud. $1.99/mo. otherwise.
$2 / month for search? I'll go back to AltaVista before paying for that
How many searches do you run per day? If Google had a Red offering (like for YouTube) to remove adds from Google, I would gladly pay it.
It’s an anchoring mechanism. Most people who would pay that (I would) will have an iCloud subscription.
$2/month for iCloud. Comes with search.
I pay $2 per day to my ISP just to get online.
Where's that Jeeves fellow when you need him?
TBH this is sort of what Amazon is trying to do with Alexa - albeit it's primarily voice-based.
Totally agree!
So many things about this don't make sense.
1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to _have_ to be ad-supported. But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand.
2) And financially, they'd trade their incredibly lucrative deal with Google for such a high risk? It just doesn't seem like something a board would approve.
3) The timing of this feels very suspicious, though maybe that's just sudden journalist interest rather than leaks... but if you were Google, this is the best thing that could happen to you lawsuit-wise. Can't you imagine a conversation one or two years ago? "Hey Apple, OK we'll pay you the $8-12 billion, but you also have to spend a little chunk of it -- just $10 million, really -- to credibly claim you're 'developing' your own search engine. Don't ever deliver it, just always be 'working' on it. Cool? Awesome, thanks."
1# It's not expensive as 2 decades ago, most of the data is behind gardens now, Reddit, FB, Twitter, Amazon, and less than 1000 other sites. Everything else can be crawled slowly.
2# Search is one of THE primary usage of the device, they have enough throwaway money to take this on. Just like Maps.
3# Sounds suspicious. But anti trust discussion started few years back and if you look through those optics EVERYTHING will look suspicious this year. There is no non-suspicious time for one of biggest companies in the world/human history to compete with each other.
The main cost of search isn't crawling.
The main cost of search is developing incredibly sophisticated ML algorithms for parsing search queries, for ranking results, and parsing web pages to provide factual results (like Google's snippets and knowledge base items).
And this is orders of magnitude more expensive than it was two decades ago. Because you've got to compete with Google which has a 20-year head start in throwing the best engineers in the world at these problems.
Nobody's going to use a search engine that isn't at least 90% as good as Google in these things. See: Bing.
Click tracking is MUCH more significant than ML/AI, Google results were very good even 10 years back when they were just based on click tracking. Whatever they are doing to parse/steal other websites data to show as snippets is only complicated because there is no schema. Look what Amazon did, they made people implement "skill" so it's all API now.
All that was solved for majority of use cases and leaped ahead by Amazon in under 5 years with Alexa, deployed as tiny hardware.
Remove click tracking and top 1000 sites from Google and it will be shit, no amount of ML/AI dance will solve that. Apple can just do top 1000 sites from each country with click tracking (to track which result users are preferring) and significantly cut traffic sent to Google. They already try to do this with Siri.
Bing was chicken(user) and egg problem (click tracking to optimize results).
I'm sorry, but nothing of what you're saying makes any sense to me.
All click tracking does is measure the quality of your results -- whether a user clicks on the first result or third or none at all. It doesn't help _generate_ quality results in the first place. Google's main first innovation was PageRank, not click tracking. Click tracking is just a metric to _judge_ the underlying algorithms.
(There is one exception: it can be used to fine-tune the order of the top 5-10 results for the most popular queries, but of course most of search is in the long tail where that fine tuning can't be done. And in any case, you still need excellent candidates for your first 10 items to begin with.)
Click tracking does nothing for parsing a query, nothing for ranking the top 10 items out of a million matches, and nothing for extracting information.
And why are you talking about the top 1,000 sites? My whole point is crawling the web is the _easy_ part.
How do you explain Apple building Maps then and forgoing a huge chunk of money they made there?
Also no reason they couldn’t sell ads so long as they don’t use personalization, people almost forget that invasion of privacy and ads need not be coupled.
> 1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported. But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand.
They could also use ads, just in a more subtle and privacy friendly way like the search ads (
or previously iAd:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
) in the App store already.
>1) A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run.
Apple's recent testimony before the House revealed that they have already spent Billions of dollars developing Apple Maps.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-tech-antitrust/u-s-te...
Could be the other way around though.
What happens if the Justice Department finds Google has a monopoly, and somehow decides that Apple can't use Google's Search Engine anymore? I mean, it's a bit of a long shot and a weird idea, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. Google could get themselves into all kinds of trouble in this investigation.
If you're Apple, investing a few tens of millions now so that you have a half-decent search engine ready in case Google goes away is a smart investment. And if nothing happens, you quietly shelve the project.
> decides that Apple can't use Google's Search Engine anymore?
I don't think it would happen like that. What might happen is that Apple users would be presented with the choice of what search engine they want to use.
It's like that on Android except Google Search and Chrome are already installed and the default, but you're presented with a choice of other search engines and browsers (might be a EU thing though).
> _But ads are the very opposite of Apple's brand._
They have ads in the App Store already. Search ads are probably the one kind of ad they could make work, since you can sell keywords without tracking and profiling your users.
Keyword ads are significantly less likely to be clicked on than tracked advertising, because keyword ads are less targeted. This is fact confirmed by Google’s and Facebook’s success at selling targeted advertising. If Apple sells keyword ads their search product will never be able to generate as much revenue as Google because the ads will be less effective.
I thought it was the other way around? Keyword ads on search results are by far the most profitable since you have intent right there ("what is the best lawn mower"), whereas the vague stalker-ish amazon ads about buying another one of the thing you just bought (or just trying to guess "well homeowners in their 30's might be interested in a lawn mower") have way lower value.
Especially on Google Search results, the top ads for brand names are usually for the first search result anyway and people click on them because they're first, making google lots of "free" money as people have to protect the top spot for their own brand
It's more that some tracking is important to result quality. For example, if I search for "eclipse" on Google, I get 5 results about the IDE, but my wife gets local maps & youtube videos about eclipses.
Parent comment was about Apple not being able to do it because of massive expense, if apple can make any profit that's not true, they don't need to make Google profit. I wonder if they would be able to make enough to cover Googles payment to be the default, though.
There’s ~1 billion Apple products and ~10 billion annually in payment from Google to Apple. Apple would need to make $10/yr per device in order to replace the revenue from Google. That’s a fairly achievable goal.
Of course, there are more complications than that simple figure, but it does provide a order of magnitude estimation.
> _"A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run. You can't do it for free. It's going to have to be ad-supported."_
Not necessarily. Firstly, you might not want to search the whole internet anyway, given how much clickbait spam, link farms, blackhat SEO, and whatnot there is now, thanks to the damage the advertising-driven search model has done to the internet. And secondly, there are alternative search funding models, e.g. subscription fee or listing fee. FWIW, that's the premise behind my side project - search just the good stuff, with no direct adverts, and result pages which contain adverts clearly flagged and heavily downranked.
> listing fee
Can you elaborate on this?
A basic listing for free, but a paid-for listing with additional benefits, e.g. greater control over indexing such as the ability to trigger a reindex on demand.
I'm wondering if they are not planning to just sell it as (of course) _privacy focused unique search experience_ for monthly fee or as part of package with most expensive device or other streaming service.
Yes, that is the way I would see it, and, I personally, would be willing to pay a reasonable (low) monthly fee for such a service.
Is a search engine that much more expensive than mapping?
A proper, popular search engine is incredibly expensive to run
_Is_ it? Google rakes in a lot of money, and so has the rope to publicly hang itself with silly, expensive initiatives.
That doesn't mean the Search product category is inherently expensive; it means Google has more money than it knows what to do with.
I wrote this week about how all tech companies are becoming conglomerates that compete with each other in an oligopoly [1]. This is a great example of that. Every big tech company seems to clone successful units of other tech companies. Over time, every big tech company becomes less distinguishable from its peers.
Comparing Google, Apple, and Amazon, all three have: smart home products, email services, music services, video conferencing, fitness trackers, phones, tablets, ad networks, app stores, a web browser, and some kind of prominent search engine (products, apps, or web).
Next up: I expect Apple to launch (or buy) a cloud computing backend.
[1]
https://www.tinker.fyi/6-break-up-tech-conglomerates/
Msft has all these as well. With Duo, they’re back in the phone game.
At $1400 it wont be the most popular one... and its a bit big.
Apple already has search built into Spotlight and Siri. It just isn’t attacking the same search problems as Google. It is possible that Apple is building all of this to make Siri smarter. Right now Google has a strategic advantage with “ok Google” vs “hey Siri”. Improving Apple’s knowledge of the web could simply be a move to improve their existing products. They might not have any interest in competing with Google on searching the web and displaying results and ads.
Both Apple and even Windows can return web search results. I hate it. I want my devices to be free of web search results unless I am in a browser searching the web.
I would rather that fund/support/use DDG than to their another rose in their garden.
Why DDG considering they’re for-profit, closed-source and basically just a Bing wrapper with little transparency?
Seems like it would make more sense for Apple to build their own Bing wrapper, team up with Microsoft, or build their own search engine from scratch.
How is that any better?
What value does DDG bring to Apple? Its user-base is insignificant (Apple will instantly have a larger user-base the moment they set it as the default in Safari). The branding is terrible, especially for Apple. There’s also nothing special about their tech since it’s just a Bing API wrapper. What’s in it for Apple?
If DDG was the default, the user base will increase
I’d be more surprised if they weren’t ready for the time when Google stops paying to be the default search engine. Can't wait to see a "choose your search engine" screen on setup of new phones.
Ending single-search domination is good. Lets see if they can actually come up with a good search engine. I love DDG but I have to search Google usually when I'm looking for obscure technical issues. Bing and Yahoo (DDG) havn't made a dent, lets see what happens.
People always list this as a negative but that’s one of the features of DDG: to search other engines.
Apple should buy DDG, rebrand it simply as Duck (plus they already have the domain), leave the privacy focus fully in place and have Weinberg run the search division, and push a large investment of capital into turning DDG into a full-fledged independent Google competitor. Of course I'd worry that Apple wouldn't be able to help themselves and would try to call it Apple Search (Search by Apple), and the web location would be something absurd like search.apple.com or apple.com/search instead of duck.com.
If Apple builds a modestly successful search engine for their iOS platform, it's going to hurt Duck's absolute growth potential. It'd be better for everyone if they just buy them and ride + improve existing momentum.
Remember Dark Sky?
Yes, because it is still a thing. What are you referring to? How Apple didn't change it when they bought it?
Oh they changed it alright... now it only works on Apple products.
Ah, you're right. I totally forgot about that. Yeah, that really sucks.
Honestly that's my biggest issue with Apple, and companies like Nvidia
Didn't they pull the Android app?
This comes up every few years, especially with facts like them owning siri.com and running the AppleBot crawler already.
2015:
https://searchengineland.com/apple-confirms-their-web-crawle...
It would be nice to have a more private search engine but with Apple's track record of building web services I'm not so optimistic.
DDG and Startpage are private search engines, why do you believe Apple’s would be more private than theirs?
I think there's space for more than two private search engines. The difference would be that it would be tightly integrated into the system and probably the default search engine in Safari which comes with an important and huge mobile market share that DDG / Startpage don't have. Most people that are not frequenting HN probably don't even know what DDG or Startpage are because they just use the defaults.
Google is a trillion dollar company based on 3 very important products.
Chrome, the browser installed in billions of devices. On Android it comes installed default, on desktop using gmail, youtube will prompt to install chrome (even using MSFT Edge which is chromium based, will prompt to install chrome)
Chrome drives traffic to Google.com as the default search engine.
The search engine is more like an ad engine since most of the above fold content is ads.
Google’s actions say their motto is “Google ads on every page, on every device”
A search engine that doesn’t optimize for ads would be a great boon for humanity.
It will be to other search engines as Ping was to social networks.
Apple is not very good at its cloud offerings. Never had been.
I don't think this holds true anymore. It takes Apple some time to get their cloud offerings right, but eventually they do. iCloud works pretty good these days. iCloud photos is pretty slick and just works.
Does it go down once in a while? Yeah, but so does GCP every now and then.
Apple is a hardware company, Google is a cloud software company. They do cross over (iCloud, Pixel), but I doubt they'll ever match each other in terms of their respective domains.
Google isn’t a very good software company. They kill off anything we like. Makes it difficult to buy into the Google ecosystem when you’re not sure if it will exist in a couple of years time. Other than Gmail and Google Search. Just too risky. I wouldn’t even touch GCE.
Edit: not a dig at engineers at Google who are crazy talented. In reference to Google as a company killing everything off.
Apple hired Google's former head of Search and AI.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/business/apple-hires-goog...
They should hire more people who actually understand how server infrastructure works. A healthy head is little comfort if the rest of the body is sick.
They have been.
>Some of the world's best cloud talent is assembling in an unlikely place: Apple
https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...
Competition against Google is always welcome but this will conceivably only work in Safari on Apple devices and require a service subscription.
Well after new browser from Microsoft, I am using Bing. Google losts its charm when they cannot sort data by date. You cannot use Google to retreive old news, everything is unsorted based on keywords. Most of the time you get same article in different pages.
They must already have some sort of index to power siri web search. I hope they find some space for disruption and create enough differenciation because I’m not sure at all that people value privacy enough to switch
Their "space for disruption" will probably be exclusive iOS integration, just like most of their recent "innovations."
If it works as bad as Siri or iOS keyboard suggestions, I don't think Google has anything to worry about.
Every large tech company has their flops.
Totally, although considering Google already has many years of experience in this field I'd be surprised if Apple could compete with them.
Related:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24338152
(the previous thread for the changes to Applebot).
This topic seems to come up every couple of years for Apple. But I guess there is actually some evidence for it now.
It is something I have wondered about for a long time, I am curious how they would handle it from a financial standpoint.
If they made it privacy focused, maybe no ads (probably a big maybe), and allowed anyone to use it (not just iOS). Could Apple search become the gateway to buying other Apple products like Google search has become for Google?
Plus any of the other benefits of building this (like improved Siri).
So if Apple give up on Google - how can they replace the revenue Google gives Apple?
Google makes money by building a profile on every internet user and then uses those profiles to target advertisement.
Can Apple do something similar? Apple not so long ago offered iAd:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAd
iAd pretty famously failed because advertisers didn't like Apple's habit of not sharing user data with them.
>Despite massive size and overwhelming popularity, Apple has struggled to court Madison Avenue's influential media buyers, the people at advertising agencies who decide where to spend the budgets of the world's biggest brands.
According to a new report form Ad Age's Kate Kaye, this issue is due in large part to the company's refusal to share valuable consumer data with its advertising partners, meaning that brands are not able to pinpoint prospective customers with nearly the same precision as they can advertising with Facebook and Google.
Here's how Kaye said one executive described Apple's decision not to provide information about individual consumers to its advertising partners on the iAd network, which sells in-app ads on iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch devices:
"One person familiar with the situation exec said Apple's refusal to share data makes it the best-looking girl at the party, forced to wear a bag over her head."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-people-think-apples-ad-17...
Does Maps make money for Apple? Does Siri make money for Apple? Apple has a history of not expecting software to make money. This is changing somewhat with their new push towards subscription services. Maybe this will be used to encourage Apple One adoption.
For this to make sense, they would have to believe that the value of having their own search engine is greater than the cost of developing it AND the billions they currently receive from Google _every year_ for making google the default search engine. Either that, or it’s a feint to undercut the recently announced US case against google.
There are other non-financial factors that I'm sure would also be part of the decision making, particularly because Apple can afford to totally forego that $10b from google if they wanted to.
Off the top of my head: (1) the reputational cost of marketing privacy but partnering with google on search; (2) the strategic benefit of pulling some portion of iPhone web traffic away from google...
Every year while it lasts
Apple will probably just charge users for the search engine by bundling it with its Apple One subscription service. Calling it now, 15 years from now Apple's paid search engine will make it so using a search engine with advertising on it will be the socioeconomic equivalent of the green sms bubbles.
You see the early versions of this effort every time you use the safari address bar. “Siri” will suggest a matching Wikipedia article or other direct link instead of you heading to google.
Leveraged properly all the OS level use from iOS could provide a lot of signal on which to build a search product.
If only Apple’s was able to do so for speech recognition.
What is the incentive for that? Apple driving ads through the search engine will not be a good look for them. They would be losing the billions coming from google too. This seems more like some reporter running with Scott galloway’s prediction and making up a story rather than tea reporting.
I wonder why there are no specialised, vertical search engines? One for developers, another for local stuff, yet another for products. Some sites are strong enough to work as such - SO for devs, Yelp for local, Amazon for products - but that only leads to problems in a long term.
It's money. They don't make enough to warrant their existence.
It definitely is good for consumers. Similar to Apple maps it might not be better than the Google offering but it'll light up a fire up both companies butts to compete for a better product
The massive resources and commitment of Microsoft gave us Bing. Building a search engine is incredibly hard. I’m not buying this, there’s no reason for Apple to start a me-too project
fwiw, if not Bing, there would be no reason for Google to pay that much money to Apple
As many things Apple does, I think this will not work well world wide. As it is the case of DDG. In my country, Google Maps and Google Search blow everything away.
This almost seems like a PG submarine [0] article. Especially now, it would benefit Google to be able to point to viable competitors. Maybe I am being too skeptical though.
[0]
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Too bad there's no money in a search engine that returns results based on exactly what's asked for, one that uses boolean operators and respects limiters. Yet, the loss-leader idea for Apple would give them an opening to offer exactly that. One can dream.
If Google pays Apple 10b to be a default search engine, it should profit at least 2x-3x from that positioning. I beleive the real number is in the ballpark of 5x. Going after that pile of dough looks quite reasonable for otherwise stagnant Apple.
I don't doubt this, Siri search is already a voice based search engine by Apple. It would be awesome if we get a privacy first, high quality search engine as an alternative to Google.com
Hopefully better attempt than Siri and Apple Maps.
An Apple search engine would almost certainly have one massive selling point: increased user privacy.
More likely the search engine would give Apple a reason to collect more user data. It isn't like a significant number of people pick Apple because of privacy and they know it. The main reason they don't collect anything now is because it isn't worth it, but with a search engine it would be.
I really can't see how you have come to that conclusion. They could make good amount of money by simple advertising, the way google started out.
The main reason the don't collect anything now is because they are a Hardware Platform company. They make much more than google, without any data collection.
If they wanted to do data collection, they wouldn't harp about not collecting data so long. They would have kept mum.
It's also a potential massive profit machine just on the iOS platform if the only thing they do is weak advertising targeting (search for shoes, get ads for shoes). iOS is such a large platform that Apple doesn't need to abuse privacy to derive immense profit from search. Google does it out of greed, because $50b or $60b in sales isn't enough versus the $166b they're getting now.
Apple could try to make a lot more money off of their iOS platform right now by becoming very aggressive at abusing privacy. They don't do it because the already lucrative path they've chosen gives them a big competitive advantage in the age of privacy violation.
If Google were a thinner organization instead of a hugely bloated monster conglomerate, and if they ran advertising with weak targeting, they would be a very profitable, very large company at a far lower sales level. That wasn't ambitious enough for Google.
Google's privacy abusing margin is Apple or Duck's opportunity.
Why not just help make DuckDuckGo better?
If they are really privacy conscious, this would be the way to go.
Was the Amazon/IMDB coming-together called an "acquisition"? Can that model be copied for Apple & DuckDuckGo?
Why not buy DuckDuckGo?
DDG does not possess a single line of search technology nor a single byte of indexes. How are people still confused about this?
Wouldn’t they have query data?
Sure, but do they have any that marginally improves what Apple already has via Siri?
DDG is just a bing proxy
I really can't see this happening, and if its does, I can't see it working.
Unfortunately it’ll be about as good as Siri and Maps.
I don't know about the US, but outside of it Apple Maps seems to be far more accurate than Google Maps.
A few examples from my own personal experience:
- A small beach town in New Zealand shows about 10 streets which have never existed, and tries to route you down them. I did some research, and they were paper roads for a planned development ~20 years ago, but were removed from government records ~15 years ago. Google still seem to be using 15+ year old data, and both myself and the local government have failed to get it corrected.
- Trying to get from the train station to my Airbnb in an Austrian city, Google's walking directions tried to send me through somebody's back yard. It wouldn't offer any other option, so I switched to Apple Maps which correctly routed me.
- A bridge near my apartment in Germany right now is closed to cars for a few months. Bicycles and pedestrians can still use it. Google Maps' walking and cycling directions route around it, Apple correctly sends you over it in walking/cycling modes, but routes around it in driving mode.
Entirely anecdotal of course, but I'm yet to experience an issue like this in the other direction, aside from the very early days of Apple Maps before they acquired TomTom's data.
I get the impression that outside of the US (where they maintain their own data), Google just hoovers up whatever open data it can find on the web, without any regard to its age or accuracy.
Here in Mexico it's terrible. Even the hardcore Apple fans I know prefer to use Waze or Google maps.
Interesting. I guess a big factor would be how widely used OpenStreetMap and TomTom (Apple's two primary data sources) are in a country.
OSM is widely used in EU for website map embeds (due to GDPR implications of Google Maps), and TomTom is very common for vehicle GPS in NZ.
If neither have wide usage in Mexico, I can see how Apple Maps wouldn't be very good, as they wouldn't have years worth of user-submitted corrections.
Maps had a rough launch but I find it's good now tbh.
Please!!
Can't they just buy DuckDuckGo?
Apple, just invest a lot of money in DDG so that they can build the search engine and we can all benefit from that.
Not everything needs to be proprietary.
A search engine not based on ads. Count me in!
i would rather like to see apple buying DDG (duck duck go) instead of diving straight in.
The flip side is DDG becoming next Siri :(
That would be a real shame. Having independent players in the space is important.
DDG Has a heavy professional focus (stackoverflow integrations, etc.)
Apple is a consumer focused company.
Oof, I remember when the Mac Pro was the dream of every professional...
No! Don't let Apple corrupt DDG!
I think there are definitely some tremors in this space. I feel like we could see some action further on? what do others think?