Is Apple preparing to launch its own search engine?

The rumor mill is revving up ahead of WWDC 2022, set to kick off on Monday, June 6th, with an oldie but a goodie: Apple is prepping the launch its own search engine at the beginning of 2023.

Oh, and a new search engine is coming too. Will Siri finally get "smart?" Hmmm.

— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) May 28, 2022

Joel Khalili for TechRadar:

The source of the rumor is a tweet (opens in new tab) from blogger Robert Scoble, which features at the end of a thread describing the announcements he expects from Apple over the next year.

In an exchange with TechRadar Pro, Scoble explained the information is based partly on conversations with sources and partly on deduction. “This is the most expensive product launch of all time [sic],” he added.

Scoble told us the search engine will not be announced at WWDC next week, but rather in January.

MacDailyNews Take: First of all, in order to launch a standalone search engine, Apple would likely be forgoing tens of billions of dollars per year, hoping to replace that with advertising revenue (Google currently pays Apple an estimated $18 billion – $20 billion annually for their search engine to be the default in Apple’s operating systems).

Apple does have an installed base of some 1.8 billion devices (and growing) and far superior user demographics than do competing, derivative OSes (which is why Google pays Apple so much to have access to people who have money and the proven will to spend it), making advertising via “Apple Search” much more valuable, so the math might work out.

In addition, governments and other entities are gunning for Apple and Alphabet, of which Google is a subsidiary, and antitrust authorities are questioning the two companies’ search deal, so Apple could be working on search as a contingency or even preparing to sever the deal and launch a first party search engine in order to preempt any antitrust actions.

There is also the privacy aspect: Apple’s reliance of Google search is a privacy weak point. “Apple Search” could tout and deliver privacy in search to differentiate itself against Google. Open sourcing the Apple search engine’s algorithms would also increase trust.

Before Apple Maps, many said it would be impossible to take on Google. Even with Apple Maps disastrous should’ve-been-tagged-beta launch, that canard has long since been disproven. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, could compete with Google in search as well.

Removing Google’s default access to Mac, iPad, and iPhone users would seriously impact Google’s advertising rates.

The one thing online that needs competition the most is Web search engines. Google’s monopoly in search hampers and affects everything online from publishing to privacy to politics and beyond. A single gatekeeper for finding things online is a prime example of why antitrust law exists (Microsoft’s also-ran Bing with 3.08% of worldwide search, and tiny niche engines like Yahoo, YANDEX, DuckDuckGo, etc. with ~1% or less are not competitive).

As we wrote of the “Apple Search” idea long ago:

If you really want to wage thermonuclear war, wage thermonuclear war. – MacDailyNews, May 30, 2014

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