I know Apple's walled garden approach isn't for everybody, but I'd personally love to see them make a search engine that isn't built around Ads. The strategy also is consistent with their pursuit of vertical integration.
I use DuckDuckGo for search, and do trust them with privacy. But if Apple did a half-decent job at nailing the search experience, I'd switch.
I think it's too soon to assume that Apple's search engine would be accessible directly from the web, rather than just being a backend for search functionality from within iOS. After all, they don't host any Apple Maps equivalent to Google Maps on the web.
I find it unlikely Apple is going to compromise their their privacy first reputation to make an advertising platform which is competitive with Google's. I wouldn't be surprised to see advertising if Apple releases search, but it will likely be context (what you searched for) driven reliance rather than based on deep tracking. That would make it far less appealing to the skeezier advertisers. I'd expect something similar to what you see in News.
I can't see how Apple would even do the kind of search result pollution Google does now. In fact, I suspect the only reason Apple is launching advertising is because they see an opportunity to provide a better experience—namely one where you see organic results immediately.
A search engine that optimizes for good content instead of SEO-spam and ads would be a very welcome addition. Google seems to have given up on fighting malicious/spammy SEO (I'd expect them to identify and downrank spammy tricks like what the recipe websites do).
I'm in favour of competition for Google, but I can't be the only one who genuinely has no issue using Google? I see people complaining on HN quite a lot but genuinely the only thing I have - in years - struggled to find was the correct eBPF documentation but even then it only took a bit of nudging.
I think there are types of searches it does very poorly on, but also different people have different expectations. In my experience, if something is a product for sale, the first several pages are always places to buy it, which is never what I’m looking for, I already have online shops I like and saw the item there, or am searching from inside a store. I want reviews, forum experience, or even just pictures. for example, actual pictures of a bike rack installed on a bike like mine, not just the manufacturer’s steel floating in a white void pics.
In addition, google has become very aggressive with disregarding words. So a search like (a fake example, not tried the search, not a real place) Jim’s tasty pizza Albuquerque 90s where I’m searching for where a restaurant I remember as a child was located, and has maybe 5 real results from a local history Wordpress blog 15 years ago and Facebook posts, Google will just drop everything specific and give you results for Albuquerque pizza, and then mainly show ads for national chains up top. So I need quotes in the search pretty much always.
If you go into the advanced search options you can tell Google to explicitly search on what you type. I use it so often for the reasons you point out (because nowadays in their infinite wisdom they will helpfully ignore quotes too) it occurs to me I should either find an extension or script to just have it enabled by default.
I use Google and Google Maps plenty, though I'm one of the ones who might complain about their [lack of] privacy practices.
I use it for certain types of searches, and not others. I'm conscious of the fact that what I'm typing and searching, and subsequently clicking through will be piled on to the stack Google thinks is me. So it's usually tech searches, real estate/apartments, street view (property or exploring).
Health matters, personal matters, etc I tend to keep out of their search box.
Though more and more I tend to do a lot of cross-searching if privacy is not a concern.
Google is fine for me (I use it as fallback when DDG fails) for technical results but for anything else it's pretty bad (recipes are a typical example). It's not just the fault of Google to be honest - the internet itself has turned into a cesspool - however Google would be in the best position to curate that and discourage that behavior by penalizing the offenders' ranking.
Google ads don’t affect what search ranks. Those are two different entities. And google realllllly wants to get rid of search spam. But it’s insanely profitable to rank, so people try really hard and often beat google.
It's debatable whether Google Ads affect Google search ranking (it's impossible to prove either way considering how many factors affect ranking), but regardless of whether they currently influence rankings, there might be reluctance to change that due to Google's business model.
Google's job as a search engine is to provide relevant and quality content. Ads are spam and noise, so if Google does want to provide quality content they should be penalizing ads just like they would penalize keyword spam and similar unpleasant SEO tactics. Given their business model however it is not in their best interests to do so, so it's very unlikely that Google will do it.
Another company that does not make their money on advertising has a better chance of doing this.
> Ads do get penalized for being a bad fit: they get a lower quality score and cost more.
My point is that as a user, ads, regardless of how "good" they are, are not what I am looking for when I click on a search result (I am talking about website ads and not ads on the results page itself) and thus a search engine that downranks pages with ads in favor of those without them would be beneficial for me.
It would be against Google's interest to implement that (as they'd also be fighting against their own ad network) but a different company not involved in the advertising business (and making high enough margins on other products) has a higher chance of delivering this successfully.
Google search has gone down the toilet. Most Google search results are ads or SEO optimized junk. It was funny once when I was searching for a medical term, all articles on first page were clearly SEO optimized and all articles were very similar from word usage, sentence construction, verbiage, like written by same person. I am surprised that Google doesn't filter out the results using some sort of similarity analysis to offer variety in results. I don't want to see all links giving exactly the same info.
And the same rumours has been going on for years, and I seriously doubt that.
Reason is that Apple already has a Search Engine. It is called Siri. It is what you get when you ask Siri Questions. What I think Apple hopes to achieve is that get 80% of what you want, From may be Recipes, Simple Answers like Exchange Rate, Nutrients, Sport Scores... etc away from Google.
Letting you to Google the absurd, hard, questions that has less Data value.
All while collecting roughly $10 per user for Default Search Engine Placement in Safari.
And remember the Privacy stand Apple has giving less Data to Google.
Basically Apple is squeezing Google in every single direction. And pitching them against Azure and AWS for Cloud Services for discount.
I can't believe this hasn't happened yet honestly. Apple Maps has been out for 7 years now. Also a bit troubling if it gains traction, considering Apple has been a lot more heavy handed in keeping content they don't approve of out from their ecosystem.
In all seriousness, Apple may do certain things well, but cloud-anything just doesn't appear to be in its DNA. Maps, mail, iCloud, Timemachine, etc. Pretty much every service I can think of is laden with bugs, quirks, actual data loss risk, or is slow enough to be unusable. I'm not even remotely surprised that there is no "Apple search" yet.
They also run the App Store, Push Notifications, iAd, Apple News, Apple Music, Apple TV, Siri, Apple Pay and some of the largest systems for photo sharing, file storage, subscriptions, retail billing and more in the world. Saying Apple is bad at cloud services in general is incorrect.
They do have plenty of high-volume services e.g. Siri, Siri Suggestions, Maps, Online Store, Apple Music that haven't had any major issues. And even iCloud is substantially better now than in the early days.
Most of your issues seemed like the old, rehashed ones from nearly a decade ago.
Apple Maps is my goto because Google Maps just hates showing street names for some reason. Zoom in so a street takes up 100% of your screen and it still won't display the name many times.
Obviously that's not the only reason, haha, it's gotten surprisingly good a few years ago. Public transit and cycling is better in Google (though nothing beats CityMapper for transit if it supports your city). But for walking and driving Apple Maps is my winner.
I thought the same thing about Time Machine. It works really well with a local laptop that I plug in from time to time for this to work. However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?
Mail is definitely a local app, even if they did screw the pooch pretty badly with that gmail bug they had a few years ago.
“However, is it considered Time Machine when an iDevice backs itself up to the cloud?”
No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data. Difference is that, with backups, you can get a copy back if you accidentally throw away a file. You typically also have multiple ‘old’ copies.
iWork apps (1) kind-of have backups in the form of versions that get synced to the cloud (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205411), but I think that’s implemented independently from iCloud’s syncing (You can use it to have multiple versions of a document locally, too)
> No. Strictly speaking, iCloud doesn’t even do backups; it syncs data
There’s literally a switch called “iCloud Backup” in Settings though. This isn’t a per-app data sync, it’s the full device restore that you can use if your phone gets stolen, dropped in the ocean, etc.
Although you should consider not using it for privacy reasons and running backups to a local machine instead, since last we heard Apple has the encryption keys and will happily hand the entire contents your phone to law enforcement given a warrant.
They have components that run in the cloud, and unfortunately, when I wrote "cloud services" I probably should have written "services that leverage the cloud."
I have a vague sense that you're right, that the services team just doesn't perform as well as other teams.
However, Apple operates many services at scales few companies ever reach, and doesn't seem to have outages much more often than those other few companies. So they're clearly doing a lot of things incredibly well, in the if-things-work-you-don't-notice sense.
They don't seem to emphasize their cloud services like Google does, and Apple charges for theirs at a much lower level than Google does, but I'm starting to think my vague intuition is wrong.
Also of note, Apple Maps in the iOS 14 beta just started accepting ratings and photos at map locations, rather than dumping you out to Yelp reviews. I'm happy with this change.
There's nothing slow about this, it's already launched. I don't understand why people don't get this -- it even says so at the top of this page: "Products like Siri and Spotlight Suggestions use Applebot"
I don't know why anyone would think that Apple would make a web page search engine like Google. Apple has already launched the Apple version in your phones integrated into the software you use.
Maybe because they are desperate for a different search provider than Google?
I don't use Siri or any assistant, so I don't seem to use what I'm being averaged into using. Majority opinion here is that Siri is seriously lacking behind the other offerings. Apple won't be oblivious to this. If it is solely due to their back-end search engine, then making that a public search engine website won't do Apple any favors if the results are truly that bad.
Voice assisted search probably won't give you much feedback. With a web based search engine, users provide feedback by ignoring some results and clicking others. Therefore releasing a search engine could help them improving it and deliver results with Siri that people would've clicked on otherwise.
Apple is mostly a focused company. There is no money in search except advertising and user tracking. Apple has already completely failed at advertising once.
Yes I realize that the App Store has ads and it is a stain that should not have ever happened.
Well they've gone to the effort to build a search index and they have sufficient market power to push millions of user onto whichever search engine they'd like. It's essentially leaving money on the table not to take the final step of popping a web frontend on it and making it the Safari default.
That they use their own search for this is not a big headlining marketing feature so they aren’t really evaluated on it.
I do think that’s a direct consequence of their experience with Maps, though I guess their hand was more forced on Maps and they had to tell the world about it.
However, using Siri and search suggestion they can, bit by bit, replace search results from other sources with their own without telling anyone about it. It’s a more careful approach.
Google's results are already pretty clean. Search results are heavily filtered (e.g. copyright, adult content) so I don't think Apple would filter more. If anything, filtering more than Google could deteriorate results.
But the SEO market would certainly change if webmasters suddenly have to appeal to more than just Google to be successful.
No, Apple is a 'full-stack' tech company. People buy their products both for their hardware and software. If they were just a hardware company, why would they bother making macOS, iOS, iMessage, Safari etc?
Haven’t you heard people whine about how Apple is so much about privacy but they take money from Google to have it as the default search?
They don’t have Google as the default search because of the money, they have it because they think it is the best. Even despite the privacy problems and the control this grants Google.
How does a maps service sell more hardware? Because using their own maps service Apple can completely control the experience.
Now maps was hard and search is much harder still so we may very well never see this released. But even then they can use this as leverage while negotiating with Google, both for money and for control.
Because your claim about them being a hardware company is incorrect.
They market themselves as a privacy focused company. Privacy is all about software and services, not hardware. Search is something they could add to their portfolio to strengthen their privacy stance.
Services are ca. 18% of Apple’s revenue, after years of huge spending and tons of dedicated effort to grow this segment. The fact that it is as high as a fifth is itself a monumental feat.
Hardware sales of the iPhone alone, excluding all computers, AirPods, and iPads, is over 40%.
The same reason why having a maps product benefits them. They want to have complete end-to-end control over a user's experience on their device, well beyond just the hardware. Having their biggest competitor dictate what happens whenever someone opens the web browser on an iPhone is a massive hole.
Hard drives are cheap enough that storing the index itself is the least expensive part of building it. Engineer time to make that index usable for a search engine is that much money every week.
One of the selling points of apple devices is getting away from google spyware. Every bit of spyware they can prevent the user from being exposed to is better.
Apple doesn’t care at all about the most common types of spyware. Nearly every app in the iOS App Store contains tons of spyware.
Apple’s view is that you consented to this sort of unaccountable invisible tracking by dozens of third parties (against whom you have zero recourse), when you agreed to the TOS of the App Store.
Apple built their own search engine over 5 years ago, under the Siri / Spotlight umbrella. When people talk about Apple building their own search engine, they generally seem to expect a website dedicated primarily to web page results, but under the covers what powers Apple's Spotlight results is basically a search engine.
The big question would be what Apple would gain from a dedicated website for search results. Would people really switch to it from Google? Why would it be a better delivery mechanism for search results than Spotlight? Not sure the answers to these questions has changed much, from 5 years ago to today.
They have a lock on mobile devices for the western world. They can by default pry away search revenue from Google at a large scale. They have the cash reserves to see this done properly. They'd be crazy not to come onto Google turf. Their hardware lines are sagging revenue growth wise. Service revenue is their biggest growth area. I have no idea why they didn't do this before.
> They have a lock on mobile devices for the western world.
They don't though. There are only a couple countries where they're more popular than Android, and only barely there. There's no country where they have 60% market share.
Or just like Iran's nuclear program, they can extract more concessions if they are permanently 1-2 years away from deploying a search engine. Google's spot as the default search in Safari already earns Apple billions per year.
It might look like that for people inside the walled garden but I suggest applying for an exit visa to have a look around the great wide world out there where you'll quickly find out that it is a whole lot more diverse than the picture painted inside the walls. Not only is it more diverse, those rumours spread about the constant onslaught of viruses on those poor creatures on the other side of that big, safe wall turn out to be untrue, most people seem to never have even seen one. Even stranger things will start to become clear, like those supposedly poor and oppressed outsiders needing far less money to get around the world than those inside the walls while at the same time having are larger choice of methods to navigate it. It wouldn't surprise me if you decided to stay, just don't forget to plan this carefully so your identity does not get stuck on the inside after which you won't be able to message your friends any more. It is a bit tricky but it is doable, many others have gone that way before.
If Apple Maps has taught us anything, probably not. But Apple would first need to pour an equally large amount of resources into web search, they way it did for Maps.
Let's see if Apple is the first one to nail it. I love using DDG but their results are not close to the same quality as Google for me, especially with localized results and unspecific requests. And DDG is backed by Microsoft's Bing which invested billions into this. Though having run a few websites, Google's crawler easily crawls 10x the amount of all other crawlers combined if they don't detect page slowdowns. I never understood why Bing was so conservative when it comes to crawling.
I believe if anyone can build a search engine that can truly deliver the same quality as Google, the whole market could change. Google is dependent on search ad revenue like nothing else, if they lose that monopoly it could really change the company.
my first reaction , was oh god, please dont! considering how worst siri is, i dont want that.. but after reading other comments like native ad tracking etc etc it could be just fine.
But google pays Apple in billions to keep its search as default, what could be the key motivation for Apple to build its own engine? its a highly saturated market and we have Duck Duck Go for privacy based , bing for alternative and heck, even wolfram alpha for computational! what Apple can improve?
Based on usage of DDG, bing and wolfram alpha, I would think Apple can improve a great deal. I'm not saying it can necessarily achieve that, but I do think there is a lot of space to improve (indexing, ranking, UX)
https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/08/27/apple-may-launch-...