Apple’s slow and steady search attack

13 years ago

“For anyone wondering why, when, or if Apple will ever make an attempt on the search market currently dominated by Google, they already have,” Joe Small Cap writes for Seeking Alpha. “As you probably know, the name of their search engine is Siri.”

“I believe that the genius behind Siri was that behind all of the fireworks of the classy female speaking robot and her iffy-beta voice recognition was a search device that was immediately placed on every new iPhone,” Joe writes. “Don’t underestimate the subtle difference between a high stakes rollout a la Microsoft with Bing versus Apple rolling out their own search engine, albeit in a much more subtle and probably effective manner… In regard to their 12% search market share, Yahoo! currently outsources to Bing. However, their contract with Microsoft can be terminated as soon as March 2013. With Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer at the helm, one can only guess the direction that she will take in regard to search.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer (photo by Brigitte Lacombe)

Joe writes, “To my knowledge, Apple has not developed a search algorithm anywhere near the level of Google or even Bing. Though it would be foolish for me to say they are not secretly working on one… But much in the same way that Apple went out and bought Siri, it would seem possible for Apple to seek an outright purchase of a search engine and integrate Siri into it… Say Apple were to purchase an underrated search engine such as DuckDuckGo. While integrating Siri and iAd into it, Apple looks for ways to cleverly monetize the search engine, using DuckDuckGo’s algorithm… In its current form, Siri is not a flagship product that has launched Apple search onto all of our computers. However, Siri’s future is immense, and depending on Apple’s plans, could become a search force to be reckoned with.”

Much more in the full article here.