Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, has explained the company’s decision not to develop a search engine to compete with Google.
Joe Rossignol for MacRumors:
In a declaration filed with a U.S. federal court in Washington, D.C. last week, Cue said Apple is against the idea for the following reasons:
• The development of a search engine would cost Apple “billions of dollars” and “take many years,” and this would divert investment money and employees away from “other growth areas” that the company is focused on.
• The search business is “rapidly evolving” due to artificial intelligence, so it would be “economically risky” for Apple to create a search engine.
• In order to create a “viable” search engine business, Apple would be required to “sell targeted advertising,” which is “not a core business” for the company and would go against its “longstanding privacy commitments.”
• Apple does not have enough “specialized professionals” and “operational infrastructure” needed to build and run a successful search engine business.
MacDailyNews Take: Translation: Don’t take away our $20+ billion annual payment from Google, please!
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I call bullshit, Apple! You’re already in the targeted search business. You have targeted ads in Maps (Guides we love), News, Music (Top Picks, Stations made for you, New releases made for you), Books (Books we love)(Limited time offer, Special offers) and the App Store (Upcoming games we love).
You have ads imbedded everywhere and it’s a bad user experience, you’re just more clever about it.
This is an interesting comment by Cue. And I think he’s right, especially with the evolution of AI, Chat GPT, Perplexity, and others that are quickly usurping a lot of Search. It seems in line with much of what I’ve followed in their corporate culture, the spirit and paranoia of Jobs.
I wish Eddy, Tim, or Phil would step out a tad more often and voice more of this culture/philosophy. While I understand the intense desire for secrecy, there are times when some common sense transparency is not such a bad thing.
James—the one and only—is not wrong; there are targeted ads. However, if privacy is your thing, our best bet in terms of a global multinational is Apple. I don’t think Apple is selling our data like FaceBook, Amazon, Google, NextDoor, and others are.
Skepticism is never a bad approach in critical thinking, but my sense is that Apple is still keeping that garden walled…so far…
DuckDuckGo is fine!
It’s what I use to simplify my web search without all the ads. Sure wish we were allowed to change Siri’s default web search on iPhone to that instead of Google.