I'd be extremely skeptical, as Apple has shown over time that this kind of large, data intensive software is not in their wheelhouse. I think Apple makes some great products, but if I had to make choose the shittiest products Apple makes, it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud. These are all areas where I think the Google equivalent (Google Assistant, Google Maps and GDrive/Docs) are much better, and the these are all much more closely related to search.
Apple Maps is now superior for me in every way. Two things at play: Apple Maps has gotten much better in the past couple of years, while Google Maps appears to be in unsupported bit rot mode.
Google maps is still better at searching for retail stores, Apple Maps is better at everything else, 10x so for driving.
I live in a major US city and I refuse to use Apple maps for navigation. In the past year, I've tried it every so often and it has taken me to the wrong place, on strange, longer routes, and tried to take me through roads that don't even exist. The traffic information is also terribly inaccurate.
So no, maybe in some cities it works, but its still a pile a garbage compared to Google maps.
Apple maps is absolutely horrendous in Croatia. Missing streets, wrong street numbers, wrong directions, and let's not even get into how many POIs and retail are missing.
Bad satellite images, missing street view and 3d views are just cherry on top.
Interesting…I have had the opposite experience. Apple maps has recently been much better at providing more complete results for searches (gyms, restaurants, retail, etc.), while still lagging behind Google for driving directions and traffic. Google maps appears to be excluding relevant results from searches (which appear in Apple maps), and instead offering up promoted locations.
That may be true only in the U.S. and a few other countries. I recall Apple said several years ago (maybe around 2017?) that it would improve maps in India. It’s 2023 and it still can’t find common addresses in major cities. Considering that Apple has repeatedly stated that India is a key market, is it the competency of the maps team that ought to be questioned?
> ... it would have to be Siri, Apple Maps and iCloud
Probably. And I think a large reason for that is because they don't like to solicit feedback for how their products work and for those types of products you NEED feedback.
It's just not in their DNA. Steve Jobs famously laid out the philosophy of "the user doesn't know what they want until we tell them" and it's a core part of their formula. At any rate, they have enough money and time to get it wrong for a long time before getting it right.
I wonder if anyone is starting to think that OpenAI And it’s ilk has the ability to commoditize web search.
Right now the others lose because Google’s really good at it. I have to admit every time I’ve tried a different search engine I’ve been massively disappointed. Heck the same for any map besides Google (except Waze which well…)
Total spit ball here - but I wonder if the thought is more trying to get to where “the puck’s going to be” where the search Apple is working on is personalized and integrated across all your life/apps/platforms as opposed to something you do typing into a field on a website.
But also with a focus on improving productivity and user value then as a way to target ads.
I see this comment a lot recently and it perplexes me every time...
I don't see how LLMs are search tools. Am I using them wrong? I've asked them for information with sources and they've hallucinated entire answers including accurate-looking but entirely non-existant URLs as sources.
They've been great for getting some ideas, and summarizing things, but if I venture into an area that I'm not a domain expert in an LLM seems like a terrible way to get info.
But everyone seems to think they're the next search replacement... So I have to wonder if I've just got bad luck with them, or somehow haven't groked how to get them to give valid truthful info.
Apple Maps and iCloud are excellent. Siri still does suck.
Your conception of the first two are probably due to their subpar launch. But they have improved to the point of being better and more tightly integrated than their competitors nowadays.
Apple Maps is actually really good these days. It doesn't have feature parity with Google Maps, but I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing. The core things: directions, POI and overall design are just as good, if not better than Google.
Kagi, as everyone seems to forget, is a frontend for the Google Search API with some nice filtering/custom prioritization features. The results are good because they’re Google results.
If Apple launched its own search engine and made it the default on its products, everybody would welcome that and absolutely no-one at all would denounce it as an abuse of their dominant position on their own products and call for tougher antitrust enforcement against Apple.
Also:
> Apple already designs its own [list of digital services].
> The only thing missing is a full-blown Apple search engine.
I dunno, being able to deploy their own baseband processors feels like a higher priority for Apple.
Will it happen though? I get that COVID will be disrupting this but in my mind this has been the next big hardware (vs device/software/service) target since Apple Silicon.
In my mind it's almost Apple Car levels of vaporware.
They're certainly trying. They bought up the old Intel modem IP and team. Qualcomm is an existential threat to their business so it makes sense to try to get them out of there.
Honest take: I’m an Apple customer (no, I’m not interested in hearing how terrible that makes me). I want to see them focusing on innovating in hardware that works for their products. I want to see them improving and stabilizing Swift and SwuftUI. I want to see them actually investing in fixing long-standing issues with macOS. The last thing I want as an Apple customer is for them to launch a giant new undertaking like search. Right now they have been fairly good, with some significant exceptions, on user privacy issues. A search engine, especially one relying on ad revenue, would muddy those incentives. And it would be a massive investment in an area they just don’t have any reason to touch aside from trying to stick it to Google.
I share your concern, but I'm a bit ambivalent on this. I though the same of Apple TV: I don't want them wasting energy on things like bad movies/TV shows when macOS's got so many missing features and bugs.
It turns out, it didn't diverge their attention, at least from the outside, and they created good content.
Google needs a good push, that's for sure. I doubt Apple has the core talent now to compete when Siri is what is and has been for more than a decade, but who knows, they've got the money. Maybe they could buy Kagi.
AppleTV felt to me like it wasn’t so far outside Apple’s reach, especially taking into consideration iTunes as a major product/precursor.
I’m more concerned about the incentives that being in search would create, to be honest, because if it is at all based on ad revenue for support, it injects incentives exactly opposed to the ones they have now as far as user privacy, etc. are concerned.
> assuming it can sell advertising and search slots at the same price as Google
I'd imagine if Apple did launch a search engine (which I don't really believe is fully within their proficiency wheelhouse, though maybe buying something like Kagi could work?) I'd think they could sell their ads for more than Google does for the same reasons developers make more on iOS compared to Android.
All that said I'd really not like to see Apple go down the advertising route. I'm already unhappy with the amount they do and would like to see that shrink, not grow.
I would like to see less of Apple's revenue come from advertising, not more. So if it is a paid search engine with no ads, then awesome. But I doubt that will happen.
More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I can tell, even with the new support for custom domains and Apple Business Essentials, iCloud still isn't designed for teams. The number of people you can share a domain with and the number of email addresses you can have per domain seem very limited. Or are there different limits for managed Apple IDs?
>More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace.
One of the things I like about the Apple ecosystem is that it doesn't cater to enterprise customers very much. Their focus is on what the individual wants rather than what the CTO of some huge corporation needs as is the case with Microsoft.
I will place a bet against Apple successfully launching their own general purpose Google competitor successfully before 2028.
Search is incredibly complex and expensive to build and run. Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services (iirc they’re around double the cost of gdrive). Say, it’s 2-3 years for them to build out capacity, and another 1-2 years to get the software working well. That still would make it a mad dash.
That being said, I can see Apple building a special purpose alternative to Google, indexing a small subset of the web, which is curated - think what gets put on Apple News, or similar.
Right, but hiring, building a team, getting them performant — takes time. Apple can do it as a skunkworks style operation, probably better than most other companies out there, but such an undertaking would be a multibillion dollar hole that I expect would be hard to explain away, even if it classified as “iCloud R&D”
is this just google propaganda trying to sway public opinion towards them not having a monopoly because “well apple could do it”. Why would apple invest anything into search when they get paid billions not to?
Readit News
Google maps is still better at searching for retail stores, Apple Maps is better at everything else, 10x so for driving.
So no, maybe in some cities it works, but its still a pile a garbage compared to Google maps.
Bad satellite images, missing street view and 3d views are just cherry on top.
There's multiple roads where it will tell you constantly to take a U turn while indicating a straight line visually.
It routinely lags weeks behind road closures.
It's lane suggestions are laughable at best.
I've driven many many miles around the US and Apple maps is easily a distant third between Waze and Google
Probably. And I think a large reason for that is because they don't like to solicit feedback for how their products work and for those types of products you NEED feedback.
Right now the others lose because Google’s really good at it. I have to admit every time I’ve tried a different search engine I’ve been massively disappointed. Heck the same for any map besides Google (except Waze which well…)
Total spit ball here - but I wonder if the thought is more trying to get to where “the puck’s going to be” where the search Apple is working on is personalized and integrated across all your life/apps/platforms as opposed to something you do typing into a field on a website.
But also with a focus on improving productivity and user value then as a way to target ads.
I don't see how LLMs are search tools. Am I using them wrong? I've asked them for information with sources and they've hallucinated entire answers including accurate-looking but entirely non-existant URLs as sources.
They've been great for getting some ideas, and summarizing things, but if I venture into an area that I'm not a domain expert in an LLM seems like a terrible way to get info.
But everyone seems to think they're the next search replacement... So I have to wonder if I've just got bad luck with them, or somehow haven't groked how to get them to give valid truthful info.
Your conception of the first two are probably due to their subpar launch. But they have improved to the point of being better and more tightly integrated than their competitors nowadays.
Dead Comment
Also:
> Apple already designs its own [list of digital services].
> The only thing missing is a full-blown Apple search engine.
I dunno, being able to deploy their own baseband processors feels like a higher priority for Apple.
Will it happen though? I get that COVID will be disrupting this but in my mind this has been the next big hardware (vs device/software/service) target since Apple Silicon.
In my mind it's almost Apple Car levels of vaporware.
Dead Comment
It turns out, it didn't diverge their attention, at least from the outside, and they created good content.
Google needs a good push, that's for sure. I doubt Apple has the core talent now to compete when Siri is what is and has been for more than a decade, but who knows, they've got the money. Maybe they could buy Kagi.
I’m more concerned about the incentives that being in search would create, to be honest, because if it is at all based on ad revenue for support, it injects incentives exactly opposed to the ones they have now as far as user privacy, etc. are concerned.
I'd imagine if Apple did launch a search engine (which I don't really believe is fully within their proficiency wheelhouse, though maybe buying something like Kagi could work?) I'd think they could sell their ads for more than Google does for the same reasons developers make more on iOS compared to Android.
All that said I'd really not like to see Apple go down the advertising route. I'm already unhappy with the amount they do and would like to see that shrink, not grow.
Deleted Comment
They could probably have sufficient ad inventory at launch to become a big player in the ad space.
More than search, I wish Apple would compete with Google Workspace. Correct me if I am wrong, but from what I can tell, even with the new support for custom domains and Apple Business Essentials, iCloud still isn't designed for teams. The number of people you can share a domain with and the number of email addresses you can have per domain seem very limited. Or are there different limits for managed Apple IDs?
One of the things I like about the Apple ecosystem is that it doesn't cater to enterprise customers very much. Their focus is on what the individual wants rather than what the CTO of some huge corporation needs as is the case with Microsoft.
Search is incredibly complex and expensive to build and run. Apple lacks the server side chops to build super low margin services (iirc they’re around double the cost of gdrive). Say, it’s 2-3 years for them to build out capacity, and another 1-2 years to get the software working well. That still would make it a mad dash.
That being said, I can see Apple building a special purpose alternative to Google, indexing a small subset of the web, which is curated - think what gets put on Apple News, or similar.
https://www.protocol.com/apple-hires-cloud-open-source-engin...
Has much materialized from this?