Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
But that doesn't mean I think Apple has found someone to build it the next great search engine. If you had a really great idea for search, would you take it to an existing company or would you launch a new business?
Sure, money's tight at the moment, but there's so much traffic and revenue around search that I'd find it hard to believe that a really good idea couldn't get funding.
So I'm inclined to agree with Arrington when he says "Apple doesn’t like the search experience on its mobile devices, and may be building a radically different user experience which is much more visual than exists today. It will likely still be powered by Google results, but Apple may present it in a very different way that suits mobile users much better."
Notwithstanding any iPhone/Android rivalry, Apple and Google seem to have a pretty good relationship. And Google's huge search share (70 percent according to Compete.com) means it also gets the lion's share of search-related revenue - which benefits Apple in terms of the commission it receives for Safari directing search traffic to Google.
So a new front-end for Google makes sense to me. The source of the rumours could be something as simple as a reworking of the Google app for the iPhone, but you'd be brave to completely rule out something more substantial.
Just because HotSauce failed to take off a decade ago as a way of navigating the web, who is to say that there isn't room to Think Different about what a user does or sees when searching?
A more mundane possibility is that Apple is planning to tidy up search on the Mac. Spotlight, Apple's desktop search tool generally works well. A third-party developer has extended it to collect the top Google results for the specified query, and Google itself offers an add-in to index the user's Google Docs. (There's also Google Desktop, which provides a unified Google-style search of local and web content.)
But an honest-to-goodness Apple web search engine? I don't think so.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
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