Apple’s Google Search Alternative is at Least Four Years Away: Report

Apple is “at least four years away” from launching its own search engine to rival Google’s — reports The Information.
The iPhone maker has been quietly labouring to build an alternative to Google’s flagship product for years now. Apple bolstered its efforts when it acquired Laserlike, an AI news startup founded by three Google engineers, back in 2018. That same year, Apple also poached Google’s head of Search and AI, John Giannandrea, and made him Vice President of machine learning and artificial intelligence.
Unfortunately, Apple’s plans to create an in-house search engine recently suffered a major setback as Laserlike’s founders exited the company to return to Google.
Laserlike cofounder Srinivasan Venkatachary had settled into the senior director role for Apple’s search team, helping manage at least 200 employees in the department and reporting directly to Giannandrea.
Venkatachary and fellow Laserlike cofounders Steven Baker and Anand Shukla contribute to a growing list of recent high-profile exits from Apple, which also includes design chief Evans Hankey and key retail executives Anna Matthiasson and Mary Demby.
According to one person working with Apple’s search team, the company’s planned Google Search replacement is now at least four years away. However, the team is focused on more than just developing a search engine.
Apple’s search team is also tasked with developing features for Spotlight and working to improve Siri and Siri Suggestions. One source told The Information that one of the team’s top priorities in the short term is improving Spotlight and making it capable of handling “100 times more queries” than it does today.
Even though it may be a while before it actually materializes, an Apple search engine would allow the tech giant to take on Google in yet another arena.
Google currently pays Apple billions of dollars every year to be the default search engine on all Apple devices, which drives major ad revenue for the search and advertising goliath. One person who has been involved with Apple’s search team said a solid Google Search competitor could give the company even more leverage in its negotiations with Google over the multibillion-dollar deal.
In the meantime, Apple is considering using the technology it has developed to power search for other products, such as Apple Music and the App Store. Apple is already using it to generate data for teams developing apps like Translate that use natural language processing, sift through tweets for newsworthy events that should show up in results, and curate Apple News articles.
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Its really interesting that Apple wants to run all and control all aspects of their customers lives. Now Apple wants to run their own search engine. So will this search engine only work for Apple users, and nobody else? That would be a pretty USELESS search engine, and it would automatically become biased search data for Apple and its customers.
Also I notice iPhoneincanada has not mentioned a thing about the class action lawsuit against Apple, in their home tuff, and their so called privacy. Apple still tracks its users even if you disable it. Also Apple’s own apps even record their customers keystrokes and Apple tracks that data. So I guess you guys don’t want to post an article about how Apple lied about protecting the privacy rights of its own customers.
Even Bloomberg wrote a piece on it.
Spammy, is that you?
Have you been hiding under a rock? So what have you got to say for yourself with the latest news in regards to Apple customers privacy fiasco? Even if customers disable Apple from tracking any of their data, then Apple just ignores that and continues to track and collect their users data. Apple lied again! Privacy, what privacy? Yet you would always preach that Apple cares about their customers privacy and security, and at the same time tell everyone that no one should trust Google, Meta, Android, Samsung, and others. So it looks like you really have to eat a ton of crow. Plus what do you think about the US federal courts now getting involved with going after Apple. As Jim Cramer would say, sell, sell, sell.
So, it was you Spammy. Welcome back!
I did hear google was recently fined, again, hundreds of millions of dollars, again, for fooling their users into thinking their toggles to disable tracking actually did anything, again.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/14/tech/google-location-tracking-settlement/index.html
Is that the one you were talking about? Because it sounds exactly like what you were talking about, you just confused the company name again.
Or were you taking about google getting caught and fined, again, for targeting children? (I know, you find that attractive about them)
I certainly hope that it will be a better product than Siri – which is pretty stupid and useless. I can say “Hey Siri, open the garage door”, but I can’t say “Hey Siri, open the garage door, and unlock the front door”. It’s a really dumb product.