[jeroenhd]

Apple has enough spare cash to buy a small country. They can build a search engine if they wanted to.

There's a reason there are only a dozen or so successful search engines worldwide, and maybe five successful image search engines. The margins are razor thin, it's a constant battle against "SEO optimisers" trying to ruin search engines for profit, and the moment they get popular governments start coming up with very creepy requests and demands.

It'll cost them billions and they won't know if they can even beat Google before Google drops them as a client for trying to compete with them, taking out a lucrative multi billion dollar deal for a default setting.

No, I think they'll just contract Microsoft Bing and rid themselves of the risks. They're already incorporating Microsoft's side OpenAI side project into their service stack, so it'd just make sense to couple further. Maybe the American government will sue them for that deal as well, but before that's final there will be years of not decades of lawsuits and appeals.