[dividedbyzero]

I hope they do – Google is far, far, far too dominant in this space, and small-ish incumbents don't really stand a chance. If they keep up their privacy-friendly stance, this could really become something neat. I'd like for at least a little bit of competition in the gatekeeper-for-human-knowledge space.

[mgh2]

I honestly don't like my search results mingled with the advertising industry: there is bias in all results, you can't trust in information if it is not impartial. People used to create content to advance knowledge, but the amount of crap nowadays motivated my money (even if it is good quality) concerns me about the education of the human civilization as a whole. "The love of money (greed) is the root of all evil": Google, Amazon, Facebook all are already deep down this hole. Apple might be the only company that still has some decency left.

[switch11]

Agreed totally

there are parts of Microsoft that are also very honest

For that matter there are even divisions within Google that want to do good stuff

However, Amazon, Facebook and 90% of Google are basically just the precursors of The Matrix now

Their ideal is that all people are mindless zombies, living on universal basic income, like vegatbles/animals, and spending all their money on AmazooogleBook

[elihu]

I think there's a great opportunity now for a new search engine that evaluates the general spamminess of a site, and then punishes sites that link to spammy sites.

[tweetle_beetle]

This has already been in place for a long time. So much so in fact that you used to be able to attack a sites rankings by creating, or stealing, many low quality sites and publishing links on them to the victim's site. The victim, if they were lucky enough to know about theses things, would then have to create a Search Console account (for Google) and declare that the sites have nothing to do with them and Google should ignore them for ranking purposes.

These days there are more attributes to add subtlety to your outbound links of you want the search engines to take you seriously.[1] I'm sure other search engines make similar judgements based on them.

[1] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en

[elihu]

I was aware of that, and it's exactly backwards. Google is punishing sites for having low-quality sites point to them (even if they have no control of them). What I'm suggesting is the opposite, that a site be punished for its outward links, if they point to low-quality sites.

(One could do this separately for various kinds of undesirable content and let the users choose whether they want to avoid spam, hate speech, plagiarized content, nsfw content, misinformation, Rick Astley videos, and so on.)

[flukus]

Punishing slow complicated sites and sites with annoying newsletter or cookie notifications would be nice too. Promote simple, fast readable sites with no dark patterns.

There's plenty of room for improvement in search. DDG is already edging ahead because it searches for what I want, not what it thinks I want.

[ianai]

I’d be interested if I could alternate which sort of weights to apply-like you and sibling comment suggest.

[throwawayinfo]

Google already does this. It's an NP hard problem for sure.

[zeta0134]

I wonder if there'd be any value in a search engine that recognized popular third-party ad networks and simply did not add to its index any page which includes them. (Or, at least, provided users an option to filter those results out.)

[dividedbyzero]

How would a search engine that doesn't have pretty much any major publication and a lot of content-driven websites gain any traction at all? There is so much it couldn't find, and while you may be fine with that, I doubt many people would be.

[kyleee]

It's a constant high stakes cat and mouse game though. A good idea for sure but the ad networks will expend incredible effort to avoid the filters

[Ancapistani]

> "The love of money (greed) is the root of all evil": Google, Amazon, Facebook all are already deep down this hole. Apple might be the only company that still has some decency left.

While I largely agree with your impressions, I find it ironic to see Apple mentioned in that context. They are the third most valuable company on Earth, worth about $1.3 trillion: https://fxssi.com/top-10-most-valuable-companies-in-the-worl...

[stevendaniels]

They are currently the most valuable company in the world: https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-now-wor...

[mgh2]

There is a difference in how you make that money: the end does not justify the means. You can become rich by righteous means (although harder). Apple is not perfect, but at least for now, they did not sell out yet. Microsoft is a close 2nd, after some redemption lol

[shard]

Don't forget that Apple is a multinational megacorp, and is user centric only when it suits them. Consider Tim Cook speaking at the conference used by the Chinese government to promote internet regulation, saying that the vision of the conference is one that Apple shares, and also the handing over of user data to Chinese servers (encrypted, but still out of their control).

[victords]

So the 2T dollars company is the decent one?

[james_s_tayler]

Buy books then.

[ogre_codes]

For me, this is the big reason to celebrate this. A duopoly in search is at least marginally better than a monopoly. If Maps is any indication, people will bitch about it for a year or so, but after 2 years, 80%+ of users will be using it.

Personally, I'd love if Apple put this out there ad-free. Getting clean, honest search results was why I switched to Google to start with. Google's current platform where almost all search results above the fold are paid for is what we switched to Google to get away from. DDG is piles better in this regard now.

[mantap]

Apple maps is probably a good example because outside the US it is still useless, 8 years later. I don't expect an Apple search engine to be any different.

[matthewmacleod]

In the UK it’s broadly as effective as a mapping tool, in my experience. Better in many ways, even; Google Maps is rammed full of adverts to the point it’s actually kind of distracting.

That’s not to mention the desktop app - it’s a step change in performance versus Google Maps being a sluggish browser experience.

[mantap]

In many parts of the world Apple maps is incapable to even give directions. I kid not. Go to e.g. Colombia and try to make directions between two places. It won't let you.

It just seems that Apple doesn't invest much in maps if they don't see a profit motive. They are very much capable of competing with Google Maps but they choose to build a more limited product that only works well in certain parts of the world where there are high concentrations of iPhone users. That's fine but it's not what I want in a maps app, I want consistency.

[lutoma]

I switched to Apple Maps a few months ago and haven't run into any issues using it in various cities in Germany.

The main missing feature for me used to be public transit routing, but they added that a few updates ago and it generates pretty much identical itineraries to Google Maps.

[dividedbyzero]

It doesn't seem to have cycling directions in Munich, that's a pity, lots of nice spots there you can't very well get to by car or public transport

[ogre_codes]

Is only just now adding cycling directions in limited places. One of the big places (IMO big) they've really lagged Google.

[frio]

Depends where you are, I guess? I'd've thought NZ's little backwater roads would be useless still, but Apple Maps has been fine for me for a long time now. I still occasionally use Google (Apple doesn't integrate cycling information where I live), but it's very very rare these days.

[kiwijamo]

NZ coverage is pretty decent in Apple Maps. I went to the Far North a few weeks back. Was staying with family. They just moved into a new house in a new area--maybe say 6 months to a year ago. Apple Maps had their address, whereas their street was nowhere to be found in Google Maps (just an outline which I assume they derived from satellite images?). Overall I find both have gaps--so neither have perfect coverage. As a Android owner I use Google Maps, and my husband has an Apple and uses Apple Maps. We consult with each other's maps on a regular basis since we don't really trust either!

[lern_too_spel]

> Personally, I'd love if Apple put this out there ad-free.

Apple isn't a charity.

[ogre_codes]

> Apple isn't a charity.

I don't necessarily expect this will be the case, I was just saying that I would very much prefer it. Apple doesn't charge for or have advertising on quite a few services so it's a crap shoot which way they will go. But if they want large-scale adoption, they need a big differentiation and zero adverts is a good start.

I do doubt Apple would launch a search page that is as buries organic results below the fold the way Google does now though.

For me, the clean look DDG sports is Apple's big competition at this point. If they don't deliver as-good-as-or-better results and interface as DDG, then I'll stick with DDG as my default (and Google as my "I can't find it on DDG" backup).

[saagarjha]

They aren't, but they make a decent amount of money from other things.

[lern_too_spel]

Exactly. They do things that make money. This removes a big source of money, adds a big cost, and worsens user experience.

I'd love it if they made Apple Music and Apple TV free too.

[ogre_codes]

Apple implements things which differentiates the iPhone and makes the experience better. If they see search as a way of doing that, they might well do it. There are a lot of services which are accessible to iPhone users which are completely free for years. The App Store, Find My iPhone, Find My Friends, the iCloud APIs (not the storage you buy for backup, but the API servers used by 3rd party developers). Maps is the obvious/ big one which is extremely expensive to offer.

They also offer content services like Music, TV+, and News+... services which they pay 3rd parties to use or develop content for. These are all quite distinct from Apple most other Apple services in that they are about the content someone else creates. Search definitely doesn’t fit into the same bucket as Apple Music and Apple TV+.

Apple News and the App Store itself are the only parts of Apple which get some revenue from advertising platforms.

If they see search the way they see maps, it could be free. It’s possible they will push an advertising platform with search. I don’t think it’s anywhere near a slam dunk though, and it’s possible it will have a small advertising load to support some costs like the App Store does.

Apple doesn’t need Search to be a profit center. They might put advertising on the platform (in fact I’d say it’s likely). But they don’t need it to look like Google’s pile of adverts with a few organic results at the bottom.

[lern_too_spel]

Apple's choice for Maps was to pay Google or some other service a per user fee to provide turn by turn directions, lose all their users to Android (which had that feature for free), or make their own maps. They didn't provide it for free to differentiate -- the experience was laughably bad at launch. They provided it for free because their cash cow was about to keel over.

[bnj]

I could see apple adding “Apple search” as a value add for a subscription service which includes music/tv...

[bllguo]

could you source 80%+ users using apple maps? that is simply an unbelievable number.

for me, if this follows the trajectory of apple maps, i will never have any reason to consider using apple search

[simonh]

Article about Google Maps usage on phones in the UK collapsing as soon as Apple Maps was launched - from 2013.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/26/apple-map...

Apple Maps used on iOS 3x as often as Google Maps, from 2015.

https://9to5mac.com/2015/12/07/apple-maps-usage-numbers/

I can’t source the 80% but it’s probably not far off that on iOS these days. Even so, Google Maps still has about 2/3 market share overall. It dominates on Android, and a significant number of iPhone users still use it. However for Apple Maps on iOS if it’s the default, it just has to be good enough and most people will stick with it.

[bllguo]

thank you, pretty impressive. sounds reasonable for them to think they can accomplish the same with search, then

[redisman]

Google is also really bad these days. Sure they have impressive trivia features but searching for solid, reliable information is really crappy. The first page is always blogspam that seems like it's generated by a AI or someone who's being paid $5/h to write filler that doesn't quite count as SEO.

The only way I can find (non-programming) information that is 50% reliable rather than 10% reliable is to append "reddit" to any queries.

[danudey]

Maybe they should build their own indexing backend and buy up DuckDuckGo for the frontend/user base/etc.

[ogre_codes]

Apple doesn't buy companies for their user base.

And while DDG's front end was innovative 20 years ago when Google did it, it's pretty basic (which I love) and shouldn't be too difficult to copy.

The big challenge with search is the index.

[jasonv]

I spent a lot of time digging through all the oft-mentioned search engines here, and the interfaces between G, B, DDG and the others (Runnaroo, Startpage, etc) are all surprisingly similar. And they're all pretty unappealing (to me).

Visualizations of results have improved so much in the last 10+ years, hopefully "visualization of search results" can also be advanced.

[chris_f]

As the creator of the upstart search engine on that list (Runnaroo), I do try to differentiate it from the the search providers, but there is a risk of being too different from what people expect.

Take a look at the below search [0], it is distinctly different from the SERPs of the other search engines for the same query, but you are correct that we still focus on just listing information vs. visualizing it. Maybe something for us to explore.

From a search visualization perspective, check out Carrot2 [1] for something more innovative. Swisscows [2] also has some nice visualization elements.

[0] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=full+text+search+php

[1] https://www.runnaroo.com/search?term=carrot2

[2] https://swisscows.com/

[throwawayinfo]

I don't think the index is the challenge. Anyone with enough machines and gigabits can index a big enough portion of "the web". The real difficult part is ranking and understanding web pages themselves.

[ogre_codes]

> The real difficult part is ranking and understanding web pages themselves.

This is what I was referring to.

[kabes]

Why would they? If Apple makes it the default search engine on iOS they immediately dwarf the ddg user base. And the front end is the easy part of a search engine.

[redisman]

UX is what has always set Apple apart. I don't see any universe where they would off-load that to a 3rd party.

[dreamcompiler]

What we really need is a spider/database that's publicly-funded like PBS, with an open API that anyone can write search engines on top of. That's the way forward for search innovation.