“We’ve received multiple (if thin) reports that Apple is working on a search engine of some sort,” Michael Arrington reports for TechCrunch.
“Apple’s Safari browser has 6-7% market share, and currently uses Google as the search engine for both the standard and iPhone/iPod versions (unlike other browsers, you don’t have a choice),” Arrington reports.
MacDailyNews Take: Incorrect. For iPhone and iPod touch: Settings>Safari>Search Engine: Choose “Google” or “Yahoo!” And, of course, Safari is customizable by third-parties, including allowing the other search engine additions. One such example is David Watanabe’s Inquisitor.
Arrington continues, “Also, Apple can’t be super pleased with Google’s competition to the iPhone with Android. Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who’s also on Apple’s board of directors, sits out of discussions involving Apple’s mobile strategy, and rumor is he may leave the board. But one important fact that isn’t checking out – if Apple were building a search engine, they’d be hiring search experts and engineers. We’ve talked to a ton of them at all the big companies, and while some of them heard the same rumors, none have lost search employees to Apple, or heard of any specific hirings.”
“Here’s what we think is really going on: Apple doesn’t like the search experience on its mobile devices, and may be building a radically different user experience which is much more visual than exists today,” Arrington reports. “It will likely still be powered by Google…”
More in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Jonathan G.” for the heads up.]
@JMO:
Google is far from perfect. Apple could vastly improve (from a user’s perspective) the searching offered by Google in many ways:
1) Sponsored results more clearly identified
2) on the search results page, block cookies to improve list load time. Google wastes user CPU time loading its favorite pages in the background
3) more obvious search modifiers
4) better support for removing redundant and duplicate findings
5) better support for user options to consistently filter OR corral search results by domain/date/content provider/type/etc
6) more powerful parental controls to always restrict certain keywords or domains
7) more complete worldwide search and language detection (that is, not assuming that all content hosted in Spain is written in Spanish, but actually detecting languages)
and so on. Apple has always been an innovator, and if it chooses to compete here, there is much to be innovated.
They’re working on Spotlight. They consider it a disaster… for some reason or other.
Apple would get smashed by Google. They’re better at making gadgets that competing with monopolies.
It’s searching for a successor.