APPLE SEARCH: IS THERE REALLY A NEW RIVAL FOR GOOGLE?

There is great excitement at Apple. The rumor are becoming more and more insistent that the American company is now close to launching its own search engine , a Google of the apple designed to fit perfectly with its devices and to put an end to the never too digested hegemony of the great G.

According to some, the clues are numerous but the real concrete steps are still far from being realized. What is really behind these rumors? Will Apple win where everyone else has failed or will Google win this fight too? Is it really worth depriving yourself of a reliable search engine for a leap in the dark of such proportions?

A historic agreement

The unsuspected Apple-Google combination has been a consolidated reality of bitten apple devices for years. More or less, in fact, iPhone, iPad and Mac have always relied on the Mountain View search engine to satisfy the requests of their users. Safari or Siri have always used Google's servers to offer answers and results to user searches and the search engine has always been the default within Apple devices.

All this is the result of a multi-year and multi-billion dollar agreement that sees Google pay huge sums to Appleof money to be the main search engine for all of its products. A way for Mountain View to enter the products of millions of people and for Cupertino to always have a safe entrance and a reliable and concrete service, even if created by an external company. However, this delicate interlocking game could end very soon.

Fragile alliance

Apple has been pondering different solutions for some time. The company has always hunted to build its empire by itself, without any outside interference. It has done so from the beginning, practically building its own devices and the software inside. Everything inside the Apple galaxy must have an apple branded on its surface: Cupertino wants to have control over everything and make sure that the user only uses its programs , because they are built to work with those devices.

The cumbersome presence of Google clashes a bit with all this, with Siri drawing on it with both hands to give most of its answers and Safari and Spotlightwho use it for many of their researches: Apple almost becomes a gateway to an external service, an almost unacceptable fact for the closed circuit that Tim Cook and his associates have always tried to build. To all this duty be added the increasingly constant antitrust pressure on the positions of large tech companies: the agreement between Apple and Google has never been frowned upon by the authorities.

Upcoming news?

Hence the desire for an epochal change not yet in the pipeline but, according to analysts, much closer than one might think. It was the Financial Times that launched the exclusive, convinced that Apple has been working on its proprietary search engine for some time. The clues in the field would be hidden, but far more numerous and present than one might initially think.

According to some tests conducted on the new iOS 14 release , in fact, the traffic generated by Siri's suggestions no longer passes in full on Google servers as it had happened up to iOS 13 , but relies for the most part on the company's internal servers.

 

Many of the suggestions offered by Spotlight and Siri have always been based on a small internal search engine from Apple, but the one that we are working on would have a much wider scope, with the aim of bringing Cupertino to be totally self-sufficient . Investments would be increasingly large, with numerous announcements for the search for engineers in the sector. The famous Apple Crawler Bot , the software made in Cupertino that analyzes web pages in an automated and methodical manner, is also increasingly being developed to give users increasingly precise and timely answers.

The importance of research

However, some clues do not make concrete proof and nothing would suggest an imminent launch of a real Apple Search . The most optimistic speak of the birth of the service already with the release of iOS 15 and the next releases, but nothing is still safe under the skies of Cupertino. What is certain is that the birth of a proprietary search engine is a passion that Apple has been cultivating for a long time, more or less since it was decided to focus everything on Siri and Spotlight by hiring the search manager John directly from Google. Giannandrea.

Tim Cook and associates strongly believe in the goodness of their servicesand in the vehicle that a search engine of its own could do to promote its apps and services at the expense of everything else. Managing the search algorithms would allow the company to withdraw even more in itself, push only its own products and software, cutting the bridges always badly tolerated with the competition.

Mission impossible?

In short, Apple Search seems to be the natural conclusion of a path that has been standing for years, the icing on the cake of a growth process that would lead Apple to control practically all of its products, with almost no external interference, especially in a vital sector like that. of the web. On the other hand, however, you will have to deal with a path that is certainly not without obstacles: wanting to create a good search engine is one thing, doing it in practice is another. Apple will have to create a rather large active index of pages, capable of giving satisfactory results, classifying an infinite number of pages in a few seconds and trying to give users answers as precise and relevant as possible.

A very difficult task that few, over the years, have managed to complete.To counter Google you have to be like Google , a company with years of experience and highly advanced search systems that have no equal in the world. Will Apple be able to get close to all this or in order to take the plunge will it be forced to sift through a search engine that is incomplete and does not live up to expectations?

Not only that, will Apple be able to give up the huge economic revenues of its agreement with Google and cut the bridges to a collaboration that, after all, was convenient for both? Ironic then that the end of this agreement, already in itself badly viewed by the antitrust authorities, will create further problems of competition and dominance, given that it would lead Apple to further increase its already strong dominant position, effectively putting an end to that minimum of alternatives within its products and any third party interference in its programs and software.

Although a natural continuation of an already traced path, the Apple search engine is a much more complicated step than one might think., full of pitfalls and problems that are certainly making the company and its top management reflect. It is likely that Apple Search will be born, not imposing itself immediately as the only alternative for users, but carrying out a policy of small steps, perhaps initially alongside Google without eliminating it permanently.

A battle could soon arise: will Apple's philosophy win this clash too and will it be forced, for once, to bow its head and look beyond? Time to time and we'll know.

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