“In 2013, Apple sold about 150 million iPhones and about 70 million iPads,” Ashraf Eassa writes for Seeking Alpha. “It’s probably safe to assume that the vast majority of these Apple customers use their phones to surf the web, and the odds are pretty good that they’re using the built-in, Apple-designed Safari browser to do that searching.”
“Apple doesn’t have its own search engine, so Google and Microsoft benefit — the latter’s search technology powers Yahoo! as well,” Eassa writes. “Could Apple develop search to cash in on this large install base of iOS devices?”
“Building a world-class, global search engine is not easy, and as talented as Apple’s engineering teams are, creating one from scratch would require a significant investment and would likely take quite a long time to do properly,” Eassa writes. “Buying a world-class search engine would be impossible unless Microsoft were willing to part with Bing, and even then, it’s unclear if Apple would be able to morph Bing into something that provides a better user experience than Google search does today.”
Full article here.
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