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Apple is stepping up its efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multi-million dollar payments that Google makes to secure the prime location of its engine on the iPhone.
In a little-noticed change in the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has started displaying its own search results and links directly to websites when users type queries from their home screen.
That web search capability marks a major advance in Apple’s internal development and could form the basis of a more comprehensive attack on Google, according to several people in the industry.
The Silicon Valley company is notoriously secretive about its internal projects, but the move adds to mounting evidence that it is working to build a rival for Google’s search engine.
Two and a half years ago, Apple took over Google’s head of search, John Giannandrea. The hiring was apparently to augment his artificial intelligence capabilities and his virtual assistant Siri, but he also brought eight years of experience in the world’s most popular search engine.
The company’s growing internal search capabilities provide it with an alternative if regulators block its lucrative partnership with Google. When the US Department of Justice launched a case last week, about payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone’s default search tool, urgency was added to the initiative.
“They [Apple] They have a credible team that I think has the experience and depth, if they wanted, to build a more general search engine, ”said Bill Coughran, a former head of engineering at Google, who is now a partner at Silicon Valley investor Sequoia Capital.
iOS 14, the latest version of the Apple iPhone operating system, can now perform some searches without using Google
Apple’s frequent job postings for search engineers are not without ambition, inviting candidates to “define and implement the architecture of Apple’s innovative search technology.”
Search marketers also point to increased activity from Applebot, the iPhone maker’s once-unknown web crawler, used to build the vast database of online material that forms the foundation of any search engine.
Suganthan Mohanadasan, a digital marketing consultant, said that Applebot has appeared “a ridiculous number of times” on its clients’ websites in recent weeks. “When tracking frequency increases, that tells us that they are trying to collect more information.”
Most significantly, iOS 14 sidelined Google for certain search features. Queries made in the search window accessed by swiping to the right from the iPhone home screen, which Apple calls “Today’s View,” display a list of Apple-generated search suggestions instead of results. of Google. These results include “autocomplete” style suggestions generated by Apple, showing that it is learning from the most common queries of its 1 billion users.
Apple declined to comment.
Building a true rival for Google’s search engine could take years. But with this year’s projected earnings topping $ 55 billion and net cash reserves at last count 81 billion, Apple can afford long-term investments.
Apple has historically tried to own and control the most important components of its products, from the custom chips that power everything from the iPhone to its AirPods and Watch accessories, to the tight integration between its software and hardware.
However, Apple has stuck with Google as the iPhone’s default search engine for more than a decade.
Now, however, Apple has a growing incentive to change that, as regulators force it to choose between defending its relationship with Google or turning against its long-time partner in search.
The US Department of Justice has placed estimated annual payments of $ 8 billion to $ 12 billion as the iPhone’s default search engine at the center of its antitrust case against the Internet group.
Sharis Pozen, co-director of the global antitrust practice at law firm Clifford Chance and a former Acting Deputy Attorney General for the Justice Department, said the case “opens another front for Apple” along with legal fights with Epic Games and others over its role. . as a guardian of the App Store. “Apple will be critical here,” he said, adding that it must “walk a fine line” in explaining why it took billions of dollars from Google.
The Justice Department could enforce an end to the exclusive deal, he said, allowing others to have equal access to the iPhone’s search defaults.
Apple has stumbled creating a rival for Google before. When Apple Maps first launched in 2012, it was so error-prone that Scott Forstall, one of the late co-founder Steve Jobs’s top lieutenants at the company, was forced to resign.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, co-founder of search engine Neeva, believes Apple’s move to search would be a natural fit because it already controls the hardware and the browser © 2016 Getty Images
But Apple is one of the few companies that has the resources to index the web from scratch. Most of Google’s smaller rivals license their Bing index from Microsoft, including DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused company that Apple already offers as an alternative to Google in its Safari browser, and Neeva, a Silicon startup. Valley founded by two former Google executives.
“Apple’s position is unique because it has the iPhone and the iOS. It controls the default browser, ”said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Neeva’s co-founder and Google’s former head of advertising. Expansion in search “feels natural” for Apple, he said, as it has the ability to collect data and learn from user behavior on a large scale.
More than 20 years after Google was founded, creating a search engine today “is still technically very difficult, but it’s not as difficult as it used to be,” said Coughran, who was one of the investors who invested $ 35 million. dollars in Neeva. That’s due in part to the cheaper cloud computing infrastructure and open source tools that are available to both Apple and startups like Neeva.
Still, the scale of the problem is staggering. “Any reasonable search engine has to have between 20 and 50 billion pages in its active index,” Ramaswamy said. When a user runs a query, the retrieval system must sift through large amounts of data and then sort it into milliseconds.
Some observers still dismiss the idea that Apple will create a complete search rival for Google.
Dan Wang, an associate professor of business at Columbia Business School, said it would be “extremely difficult” for Apple to catch up.
“Google’s advantage comes from scale,” he said, as endless user feedback helps fine-tune results and identify areas for improvement. “Google receives hundreds of millions of queries every minute from users around the world – that’s a huge advantage when it comes to data.”
Additional information from Richard Waters in San Francisco
