“Apple’s Siri is beginning to eat Google’s lunch. Google has spread its wings, but Google’s bread and butter is still selling advertising on search pages. Siri from Apple is the start of disintermediation from Google search,” Nigam Arora writes for MarketWatch.
“In a small study at The Arora Report, the evidence is mounting that users of Siri are consistently bypassing Google. If the results from the small study are extrapolated, in due course as Siri becomes widely available, it will change people’s habits,” Arora writes. “The new habit will be using voice to find exactly what one wants without having to comb through a large number of results, some of which may not be relevant. Further, the display space on mobile devices is limited. Who needs the distraction of side advertisements like those from Google on the small screen?”
Arora writes, “Asking a question in ordinary language and quickly finding the answer in Siri makes a Google search look like a horse and buggy compared to a car.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Ellis D.” for the heads up.]
Siri is the first feature that has made me consider jailbreaking my iPod touch. I’m not a fan of jailbreaking, but if there becomes a nice simple way to install siri on a jailbroken iPod touch I’d try it out.
Apple now needs to go for the jugular and put Siri on EVERY IOS device and Mac. Steve’s thermonuclear war on Google will end quickly and decisively. It will be a 2 pronged attack hitting them where they live in the search engine/advertising market AND reducing Android to an also ran. If this was Job’s strategy I am sure his successors are all aware of how they are to proceed.
They will after they tune the datacenter to handle the enormous volume of requests.
My feelings exactly… And it will be scorched earth in Google land … It’s funny how Karma just seems to come back to bite you.
I tried to explain this to a cable TV sales guy yesterday. When my remote (iOS device) is used with my Apple TV or Mac mini connected to my HDTV, I can ask Siri to connect me to the media sources web streaming server and watch my shows from there. The entire show from the web has less commercials than the cable’s TV episode has every 8 minutes. I pay for that cable feed and still see 6 or 8 commercials every 8 to 10 minutes. Why?!
This will end soon.
Real thermonuclear war would be to release Siri on Android…
(Here is where I meant to post this, sorry)
Is Google releasing Gmail app for the iPhone/iPad mainly to avoid people to use the built-in Mail app, where Gmail doesn’t show ads?
With Gmail app being just a wrapper to the web interface, it is still possible for them to keep showing ads in that (I think it’s only a matter of time).
May be the Gmail app is also a reaction to Google seeing lesser # of people using the web-based gmail resulting in a reduced search customers.
Apple needs to make this available on iPads as well. In our house, the iPad is heavily used for web-surfing and information search / retrieval, with the iPhone now secondary for this use. People are forgetting about Siri on the phone, and just going directly to search, because the 2 devices are similar, and screens identical.
To really get Siri ingrained, being available to use on iPad, and becoming the preferred search method will really accelerate putting a big dent in Google’s search ad business.
Seems obvious that Siri would come to the iPad2 in short order given that it has the same hardware as the iPhone 4S. Now, the first iPad, is doubtful.
iPad is less personal device than iPhone, which is always in your pocket. So Apple will hardly allow iPad 2 to have Siri anytime soon.
Technically, they could make Siri run on iPad 2 on the very first date, so but they (Jobs, actually) decided not to.
In a year or so maybe, but not in the nearest time.
But, but, the Knowledge Navigator shows the guy talking to his book like device, making appointments and organizing stuff, and then leaving it on the table as he goes to lunch!
It needs to be portable to be personal and useful? 😉
Siri needs to be everywhere to be really useful.
Fsck Gaagle! I use Scroogle Scraper.
(Have to wait until February to get iPhone 4S.)
I can see the dilemma that Siri can pose to Google. But Google, yahoo etc will just eventually learn to adjust their Siri search output to reflect their promoted or advertised/pay clients’ links rather than true search results.
When the search portals begin to sense that a query is a Siri search, they will be able to skew the result parameters.
I can see your point. Recently when I travel to USA, I use the Map App of my iPad to search direction. Instead of showing me the way to my destination, they show me the way to a sponsored place nearby. Without checking, I went to the wrong place and my response was fuck you Google, and not clicking on the link.
Actually Siri simply bypasses Google for many things. It only searches google if it can’t find it in the expected places. For instance if you search for anything available on Wolfram Alpha, Siri never touches google. If you search for a business, Siri uses yelp and never goes to Google. You can also ask Siri to search Wikipedia directly as well. All of those current methods (and there will be more in the future) bypass search engines entirely.
So you are saying Siri broadens web search to include more than the stranglehold that Google has on the web.
Don’t get me wrong, I use Google as much as the next guy, but it will be nice to know that (because of Apple) I will be using more than just Google in the future.
That would assume that Siri ever went through a Google “search portal”. Why should it? With theirs billions of research$$ Apple can probably come up with search technology better tuned to their clients than Google and with millions of users asking Siri similar things my money is literally and figuratively on Apple.
Quick, someone tell Nigam Arora to quit mixing his(?) metaphors.
his
“If the results from the small study are extrapolated…”
This drives me nuts. Currently, the only thing being bypassed by Siri are requests of Wolfram Alpha. Anything that’s weather, calendar, text or email related aren’t using Google anyway.
Until Siri can port web results into its interface, the only “lunch eating” that happens is when people change their default search to Bing.
You forgot Wikipedia searches, and local business searches (which is uses yelp for).
@m
The point is that Siri bypasses traditional search engines for a lot of queries.
Okay, come on. This is horseshit. Siri is awesome, and will only get better over time, but there is no way that Siri is going to take a really huge bite out of Google/Yahoo/Bing search. Maybe if you’re on a mobile device, it makes more sense for some kinds of searches, but as soon as you sit in front of a computer (as most of us do at work), then google.com makes way more sense. To paraphrase SJ: “Google doesn’t have to fail for Siri to succeed”.
No, search doesn’t go away. But Google becomes irrelevant, just like Yahoo/Microsoft is irrelevant now. Google/Yahoo/Microsoft will still exist with some profit, but nobody care them any more. Check this out: http://gerger.co/yalimslodge/2011/10/13/siri-artificial-intelligence-revolution-has-begun/. The ride has just begun.
Real thermonuclear war would be to release Siri on Android…
Remember Siri is in ‘Beta’. The other shoe(s) have not dropped. The data center is still coming on line. For now Siri is ‘just’ a voice interface to MILLIONS of people many of whom will be asking similar questions. As Siri learns the power will grow ALONG with features. With the Billions in hardware behind it, Siri will not be easily, cheaply, or quickly copied. Google has every reason to fear it in a very very major way.