[kellegous]

FWIW, an Apple recruiter approached me about working on a new Search-related thing. He used the following enticement in the initial email: "We are building the future of search for the best user experience (unadulterated by advertising for the first time in history)." So as best I can tell, a search experience without advertising is very much on their mind.

[peyton]

Hey, I don't think it's appropriate to post publicly information that somebody divulged to you in confidence.

[coldpie]

I don't think recruitment spam really counts as "in confidence." Certainly he's under no NDA. I guess some might consider it rude, but I wouldn't.

[untog]

He said it was the recruiter's initial e-mail. If someone e-mails you out of the blue with details like that I think you're more than allowed to tell others about it.

[kellegous]

I don't think email is considered confidential by default. Had this recruiter made any confidentiality request, I would have tried my best to honor it. Instead, he seemed more interested in spreading the word that they were entering the search game. Also, Apple has not been exactly hiding their growing interest in search. They rarely let their engineers speak in public, but they were on stage this year at Lucene Revolution giving a number of details about how they are using Solr.

[peyton]

It's not clear-cut, that's for sure. I just wanted to post a different perspective.

Thing is, if you asked the sender for permission to post pieces of their email, they'd probably say no. It seems a bit gauche to say posting is okay because "nobody told me not to."

[kellegous]

It's a good point and since journalists are already asking about it, I now wish I hadn't even posted it. I think Apple is not trying to hide the fact that they are looking for search and machine learning people, but the press will surely get it wrong trying to triangulate a vague one-liner from a recruiting email.