[mrweasel]

The fascination with Apple developing their own search is a little weird. That is not direction we'd want to go in. It seems that we'd be better of if the companies providing search was different from the device maker or operating systems and browser developers.

[SllX]

Agreed. Apple has the resources to go into a lot of businesses they don’t necessarily want to be in and they seem happy enough with the Google arrangement. They like to own and control the technologies core to their products, but even they have to draw a line otherwise they’d be building and running their own fabs.

Plus Microsoft also has a lot of money and talent and have been in the search business a very long time. Bing still sucks. Windows Live Search sucked before it, and MSN search before that. There’s no guarantee Apple could meet or beat the threshold of being at least as good as Google, only that they could, technically, if they wanted to, develop their own, and then they would be the ones the DOJ is going after over the default search engine in Safari (not to mention the punks on the EC would probably find some new law to craft targeting Apple, so it had really better be worth the investment if they were ever going to build a search engine because the price for doing so is going up).

[rightbyte]

> Bing still sucks

If I were to form a search habit today I don't think I would grade Bing lower than Google.

Google has gotten way worse and Bing way better.

Bing seems to respect the user's querries more too.

[pierat]

Try Yandex next time.

It searches exactly what you look for, and has no 'removed for piracy' search deindexes.

[hoseja]

Power of not being within reach of the US copyright cartel. (Bought by being in the grasp of another, even worse one.)

[pierat]

And?

At least our information won't easily cross those territorial boundaries.

[llamaInSouth]

and their reverse image search is way better

[hnbad]

I'm angry that I have to agree here. I use DDG and Bing primarily and Google as a fallback. Increasingly since I started doing so, Google's results were just as bad as what DDG or Bing would provide. I've downright given up on trying to search certain things because I know exactly how search engines will misinterpret what I'm asking for no matter how much I clarify because the thing they try to find is more popular (in terms of number of results) than what I'm actually asking for.

[bobthepanda]

The other thing is that it's not clear what differentiation, if any, Apple could possibly want to target in Search.

Apple Maps is sometimes nicer to use than Google Maps, but also was developed because at one point Google refused to give Apple turn-by-turn navigation, which would make it hard to sell iPhones as a phone with equal GPS capabilities as Android. There isn't really a search function that Apple needs and does not get via Google.

[mrweasel]

> Bing still sucks

Bing is actually really really good these days, but was it worth the investment? I can understand that Microsoft want some of that R&D money back, but I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private and then thrown Bing in Googles face without the ads and tracking, just to prove that "the big boys" make money on selling actual products, not their users. Sadly that wasn't the world we got, at least they resell Bing to more privacy focus companies.

[shiroiuma]

> I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private

Why would they do this? It makes zero sense. There would be zero (or really negative) ROI for doing as you suggest here. They already have a near-monopoly on desktop OSes, and these improvements you want aren't going to change that or improve the profits they get from the Windows business. It would have been colossally stupid for them to spend a ton of money making Windows "better" instead of what they did, which was to spend money on other projects, and to inserts ads and other annoyances into Windows while doing the bare minimum and also gutting their QA team. MS isn't losing any money on Windows from security problems, ads, or any other things you might think are problems.

>just to prove that "the big boys" make money on selling actual products, not their users.

Except that wouldn't have worked, because that's not what makes money now. The users have proven they don't care about high-quality products, especially for OSes.

[mrweasel]

You are 100% correct, I'm just sad that this is the state of modern business practices and mindless focus on profit above all.

It would never fly, but I'd much rather see better and safer product than another 20% on Microsofts bottom line. Business people would call me a commie.

[shiroiuma]

I'd rather see people simply switch to a better (and generally free) alternative, but they don't want to do that for some reason... It's like the old saying about a horse and water.

[OrderlyTiamat]

I just rediscovered the difference between the two this morning.

I was trying to find some half-remembered meme images to share with a friend, and I couldn't find it in ddg. appending "!g" and... first 10 results are correct. It's remarkable how good google is when searching for things that are popular, and how far it's fallen for non-popular specific technical queries.

[SllX]

> but I really wish they would have kept focus on Windows and taken the high road and made it better, more secure, more private and then thrown Bing in Googles face without the ads and tracking

I too wish more companies existed that didn’t sell out their users but what you’re asking for was never Ballmer’s Microsoft’s MO, and it doesn’t seem to be the case for Satya Nadella’s Microsoft either based off the reporting I’ve been reading on the increased enshittification of Windows 11 over time.

[hosh]

I am increasingly finding myself using ChatGPT powered Bing over Google (or rather, DuckDuckGo) for my daily driver.

[tomjen3]

Bing chat is amazing and much better than plain Google for information search.

[ralfd]

Yes, it also would misaligns their incentives. I like (love) that Apple is NOT in the advertising business and fewer phd engineers obsess about how they can make me click/view more ads.

Maybe Kagi proofs that "search" could also be financed by a premium subscription? Or being a system service which is subsidized like Siri? But I think the ad-model is the most easiest/profitable for search so there is always a pull to it.

[cmehdy]

Doesn't Apple make billions selling ads?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/15/apple-ad-business...

[mrweasel]

Somehow yes,... I'm still very interested in how that works. I doubt it's wrong, but I only see ads in the app store, surely that cannot be worth that much, if so: Apple is overcharging big time on those ads.

[vbezhenar]

Apple News, Stocks

[calciphus]

Also the 36% they get from Google showing ads on search.

That revenue is significant and would have to be replaced.

[offices]

Kagi is still fundraising & most of your subscription fee goes to sourcing results from Google. We don't know yet if it will be a sustainable business model.

[carlosjobim]

Where are they fundraising right now?

[jampekka]

Isn't the obvious reason that search is perhaps the best service to sell ads for? And Apple has the benefit that the cult would be extatic to be walled off even tighter.

[mrweasel]

I don't think Apple search would provide any tangible benefit for Apple users, nor do I hear any regular iPhone users express any desire to have Apple search, they just use the default. It might benefit Apple though, but why spend money on developing search when you can just use Google and get 36% of the revenue.

The whole wanting a 100% Apple ecosystem isn't something I think many a clamoring, except perhaps the few insane hardcore Apple fans. Also currently the alternative is pretty much locking yourself into a Google ecosystem and that's worse.

[jampekka]

Apple of course does what benefits Apple, regardless of whether it benefits the user. 100% is 64 percentage points more than 36%. And due to the lock-in Apple could do away with significantly worse search than Google.

I agree that the heavy and intentional un-interoperability of Apple products is not a benefit for the users (although some hardcore claim it is). E.g. Apple clearly benefits from preventing sideloading (to force the App store rake) or alternative browser engines, but hard to see this having at least net benefit for the user.

[gorbachev]

The Big Tech companies all seem to follow the same pattern. They create a killer product, become successful and print money for a while, and at some point they all make the same decision...they all start creating the same suite of products: mail, instant messaging, video hosting (long-form and short-form), video conferencing, search, etc.

I guess I kind of understand the motivation, but it seems so wasteful.

And if their founders become multi-billionaires, they all also start a space rocket company.

[gardenhedge]

We've all benefited though - we've gotten awesome free email and maps