Apple working on a search engine: rumour

Stephen Withers
Friday, 14 November 2008 02:10

Opinion and Analysis

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.