“Apple has hired major Amazon exec and prominent search technologist William Stasior to run its Siri unit, according to sources,” Kara Swisher reports for AllThingsD.
“At the online retail giant, Stasior has been in charge of A9, Amazon’s search and search advertising unit,” Swisher reports. “The former AltaVista exec co-founded the independent company and has run it since Udi Manber left for Google. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based A9 now provides search for Amazon sites worldwide, as well as other online retail sites.”
Swisher reports, “He will now be in charge of Siri, which is Apple’s famous voice-activated personal-assistant program… What’s more intriguing is what else Stasior might find himself working on — presumably, strengthening Apple’s search and search advertising technology in the wake of its increasing competition with Google.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Google’s going to rue the day they got greedy by deciding to try to work against Apple instead of with them. – MacDailyNews Take, March 09, 2010
Considering how bad Amazon’s search is, I’m not sure if this is a good thing. (Try searching for 64gb flash drive and it returns hundreds of results for every other size.)
Amazon search is deliberately tweaked with a bent on a wide variety of sales…
This is awesome. I love Siri and am looking forward to it getting better. Glad Apple is making Siri a centerpiece of their future strategy. I think the rest of this decade is going to be all about AI. It seems like the area of computing where the most interesting things are happening right now. It’s also an area were Microsoft and its Windows Phone is severely trailing behind Apple and Google.
v. interesting.
I’ve always said google was a passing fad.
Looks like Google will be dumped without notice again. Apple will have its own search engine. Dumping ex partnerGoogle will decrease the scope of Googles data gathering. Google will be less happy as they tally up all the loss revenue they could have had if they played fair.
Oh well!
Something tells me Siri is going to get an expanded life outside of iOS / OS X, perhaps as it’s own search service. Apple already has the siri.com domain (which redirects to the Siri info page on Apple.com) – could be a springboard to connect people with Siri via a browser.
Siri already is a search service. Each time it is used, it adds the search & results to a database that it can draw on for future searches≥
Agreed, what I mean is a more conventional search service accessible via a web browser.
A brilliant move by Tim Cook. This is evidence that Jobs is not the only innovator Apple will ever have.
Google’s definitely going to rue the day that they decided to steal Apples IP now! First Siri takes a huge bite out of Googles data pool by stealing all those precious searches, the iAd sweeps up the advertisers. It’s golden.
There you go, Apple is dedicated to beating google in search now too.
Within 6 months apple maps will be the than google maps for a start. Everyday I use apple maps it gets better and better and the detouring is instant even without a 3G connection.
Maps is great.
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