What Apple Search Engine May Look Like
By: Pen Magnet
Tags: Apple, Search Engines, Privacy, Google, Technology

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Ever since Apple took a high stand against advertising without consent from iOS 14, its stand against the current ad-giant Facebook is conspicuous.

However, the same cannot be said about Google.

To evaluate Apple’s chances in the Search arena, one must evaluate the motivations of both companies.

The paths are intersecting, just now:

Apple’s relationship with Google isn’t exactly that of competitors. They are codependent. Google has paid Apple $8-$12 Billion to keep Google as the default iOS browser. There is an antitrust lawsuit already that could bring harm to both of them, not just Google.

Imagine, $8-$12B just to keep it the default, not to eliminate others. That’s the value Google ascribes to its search business. That’s also the value it ascribes to being on every platform because it doesn’t have a strong platform of its own. Android is its licensed OS, and it has to rely on hardware partners to keep its roots strong among mobile users.

Google is quite active in the iOS ecosystem — something which is evident from the fact that its apps heavily occupy the App Store. Google Drive, Gmail, Maps, Chrome, Google Photos, Google Translate, Youtube — these are just a few big names. They signify things where Google is already dominating but needs iOS users not to fall out of the line.

Google dominates on the App Store like it has to. Apple peeks into the Play Store such that it needs it, but hasn’t figured out exactly how.

On the other hand, Apple apps on Google Play Store are in minuscule numbers: Apple Music, Apple TV, Move to iOS. They signify things that Apple is trying its foothold into. It’s far from winning in those yet. From a premium hardware company, it now wants to transform itself into a service company. But it lacks the advertising backbone that Google developed during its evolution along with the rest of the web.

Google dominates on the App Store like it has to. Apple peeks into the Play Store such that it needs it, but hasn’t figured out exactly how.

The Apple-Google relationship isn’t bitter to be exact

Apple has notoriously harassed app developers that could compete with its line of business. It rejected the Spotify app (a competitor to iTunes Music) for filing an EU complaint to circumvent 30% for an in-app purchase. Yet Google Maps, a clear winner in the map race since Apple’s mapping gaffe, is still dominating on iOS despite the fact that Apple Maps has improved much, and doesn’t track users.

Despite their fierce competition in the smartphone market, the Apple-Google relationship isn’t bitter to be exact. Their territories have been quite disparate, despite intersecting often. It is only now that their paths are intersecting, like never before.

It might get a lot interesting.

The Apple search engine may be quite different from Google:

Not the opposite, but different.

For one, the Apple search engine would be privacy-focused. This means not tweaking the search results + rankings based user profiles. That has always been its initial promise. Any lawsuit in that direction may not only break it financially; it’s also too big to afford the negative publicity fallout.

Tim Cook once said:

Our business model is very straightforward: We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers. We don’t “monetize” the information you store on your iPhone or in iCloud. And we don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.

In order to rely less on who is searching, Apple must solely rely on what is being searched.

Not personalizing results means a lot of things:

Do not collect their data.

If you collect it, do not make it leave their devices.

If you send it to your servers, encrypt it on the way, in a guaranteed end-to-end encryption manner — the lack of which got Zoom in trouble in the recent past.

Use personalization for relevant results, not ad-profiling.

In order to rely less on who is searching, Apple must solely rely on what is being searched.

Google’s secret weapon in search:

Search business is much beyond an average search user, and Google possesses the most hidden weapon that will never be monetized.

During an ordinary search user’s entire life, searching is all about best shoes/clothes/laptops/dating/diapers/clinics/schools/restaurants/tv-shows/fun videos. This consumer base forms the highest chunk of any search firm’s advertising revenue.

But search business is much beyond an average search user. It’s the collective data about quality (non-layman) searches and their overall trend. When analyzed through fine-tuned powerful machine learning GPUs, this extra volume that is little in quantity becomes much bigger in its futuristic value. In fact, it is the most hidden weapon Google possesses that is rarely talked about.

Besides its gigantic repo of users’ personal data, Google also has a huge repository of academic research. Google Scholar and Google Books are areas that aren’t monetized yet, but they definitely give it a lot more insightful peek into where knowledge is headed. They might not become products in themselves, but they might spawn off a lot of Google products simply because of the information density they capture compared to an old school SEO-high website.

For example, if searches trend in Google Scholar about a specific gene technology, Google could preemptively buy or invest in a company that leverages it before it has made its VC round.

It would be foolish to think Google may not be using any of its search data in powering its AI research arm. Since it’s open, the world benefits from it. And Google also receives back what it gives away: the contribution of the open-source community.

Enter open-source, where Google is the biggest contributor that brought us the modern web + digital Gen Z. Compare it to other giants (Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon) who only resorted to open source when they couldn’t do without it.

Being simply the most regarded company, this is where Google gets a peek into software developers’ brains, and how they shape & shake the world. Microsoft lately made a preemptive assault by acquiring GitHub, but no one understands open source today better than Google.

This means that to even compete with Google search, Apple must work harder. It must keep privacy out of the equation and still deliver more relevant results than Google across all demographies.

Where Apple could make a compelling case:

Google search has lost a lot of relevance in the recent past, thanks to its aggressive ad-based + AMP-focused search rankings.

About a decade ago, Google Chrome was a breeze in the market dominated by the infamous Internet Explorer. Today, the search experience on Google Chrome is far from the best.

For anyone who is unaware, AMP is Google’s own framework for website makers that makes it easy for Google to crawl their content. In exchange for AMP compatibility, website owners get ranked higher than their non-AMP counterparts.

But in general, the AMP benefits more to Google: it saves billions of dollars from a crawling operation that consumes less-power because of known-website format. It also displays AMP website content inline, so the user doesn’t need to leave Google. This earns Google better retention (which again means more user-click data) but less inbound traffic to website owners.

Users are annoyed, too. About a decade ago, Google Chrome was a breeze in the market dominated by the infamous Internet Explorer. Today, the search experience on Google Chrome is far from the best: You are bombarded with half-page results from the same AMP-compliant site, and you must go beyond Page 3 (pun intended) to get relevant. Upon visiting the site, notification plugins and GDPR notices punch you in the eye. While the last two are not part of the search experience, those are the changes brought about directly/indirectly by Google itself.

Will Apple Buy DuckDuckGo?

For obvious reasons, webmasters are frowning at Google. They are dying to see a sizeable competitor. DuckDuckGo, the most promising David in the race holds only 0.45% of the global market share against the Goliath Google (92.5%), but it checks a lot of privacy-focused checkboxes: It doesn’t collect personal data (no sign-ins), no geo-tracking, and no IP tracking too. There has been widespread speculation about Apple considering to buy DuckDuckGo.

While Apple could gain an early and easier foothold by acquiring an established web search player like DuckDuckGo, there are two reasons that could not happen:

Apple is already crawling the web with AppleBot — note that this is the same technology that powers Siri search rankings.

Buying a web-search engine would establish Apple as someone who needs the web to succeed. This is something Apple as a company has always distanced itself from doing.

If Apple would go for a buy, it would be more to thwart a long-term competition. Again, I do not see much of a match besides the privacy bandwagon.

It’s difficult for Apple to go the web route when it already dominates the market region of its own creation.

The devices.

The Device centered search:

Anytime you issue a command to Siri, it presents choices. Those choices are ranked not by ads, but by what is already there on the device. If you ask your iPhone Siri to make a reservation, there is a possibility that it might bring website results of nearby restaurants. But if you already have a restaurant reservation app (e.g. Yelp), chances are, it will offer it as a top choice. The web results will follow.

This has two distinct advantages:

Your intent to find a restaurant doesn’t necessarily leave the device. Your privacy is intact.

As of now, App makers (e.g. Yelp in the above example) don’t have to pay Apple an extra dime to make themselves visible as the top choice.

This means that Apple has a potentially stronger offering to both its user and supplier than web-search providers. Its success will solely depend upon how strong Siri aligns itself with user intents, and how app developers can leverage this to their advantage.

That’s where Apple still lags behind. In a recent test conducted by Apple aficionado site 9to5mac, Apple’s Siri lagged behind Google Assistant in its effectiveness to answer user queries.

Yet, the test still notes one thing: Siri wins on interactivity.

That’s a clear verdict that juxtaposes Apple’s experiences vs Google’s stockpile of information.

That’s How Apple Search Engine Will Act:

Stronger hardware is Apple’s trumpcard to compensate for lack of data.

That last fact can be the first step Apple must take in its search war journey.

In the last 2020 WWDC, Tim Cook emphasized iOS 14’s capability to do more with data on the device. A better choice than those bytes leaving for a remote server to be analyzed at peace by the hungry eyes of data scientists.

In the context of search, this means that user’s requests will be fully analyzed with the help of a neural engine present on the device itself. Whatever operation web-search engines perform on the collective search data will be performed on individual searches by the device processors.

It could still happen that the ultimate outcome of the process could be sent back to Apple servers. But this will be mainly to enable a feedback loop: To measure the efficacy of its systems (and update Search with every iOS update) rather than listening to every slang and abusive word frustrated users hurl at Siri.

This way, without competing with Google on its own turf-the web-Apple could streamline its own traffic. Keeping searches for its own services within the Siri system could be a serious advantage for Apple. That, combined with removing Google as the default search engine on Safari, Apple could make a sizable hole in the sky dominated by Google.

Apple’s Siri based search could also be leveraged on services like Apple TV and iTunes Music, to fuel its fledgling media arms. By offering better discoverability options, Apple could come up with a win-win for itself + content creators — fixing a mistake it committed in the early App Store search.

Apple search can’t survive by simply offering Apple’s own services in a monopolistic manner

With its latest M1 chip, Apple is in a stronger position to dominate on-device neural processing on desktops too. This will enforce players like Google and Bing to either empower their browsers (which will again be thwarted by Apple citing privacy) or spread themselves even on devices, such as Amazon’s Alexa.

Stronger hardware is Apple’s trump-card to compensate for lack of data. The browser-based search had its time of glory. That time might change soon. With the emergence of Gen Z, barring academic research, the search might completely move to mobile.

Following that route, Apple still must gain escape velocity to reach the inflection point, because it does not own the web. But with all of its pitfalls, that web still exists.

With all its on-device intelligence, Apple's search can’t be a sizable challenger by simply offering Apple’s own services in a monopolistic manner, an approach it has tried before and failed.

Final Thoughts:

It is not clear when Apple's search will roll out. It is also not clear how much it may alter the search business equation. It might not alter the market in a disruptive manner anytime soon. But it could create a search business category of its own.

All the outcomes will depend upon the execution.

If Apple has learned anything from its Maps experience, it might alter the search game forever.