Apple already is a company that sells some ads, if that’s what you mean by an “ad selling company.” If you mean, a company that primarily sells ads as their main revenue stream — that would be bad.
Services do require monetization, or you have to subsidize them through some other revenue stream, yeah?
Advertising is probably the simplest way to monetize search. Certainly other strategies could be tried, but that one at least is well understood, and nigh-ubiquitous.
Google pays Apple a lot of money to be their search engine. Presumably, if they became a competitor, Google would stop the $15 billion payments and Apple might want to make that up.
The loss of that payment would be part of the business model, but companies really don’t think in terms of making list revenue up.
If there is an opportunity to increase revenue (subject to mission/values/etc), you take it. A decrease in another line of business doesn’t matter. Or an increase; you wouldn’t say “hey we’ve got this amazing ad opportunity but the AirPods business is killing it so let’s not bother.”
I guess the nuance here is that the business decision might be “our search, with our ads” versus “Google’s search, with their ads, plus $15B/year”. In that case I think there’s a reasonable argument that users are better off with Apple’s ads than Google’s.
It doesn't require it, but it provides you with Google's one big magic trick:
If someone searches for "hotels new york" you have what's called a motivated customer. He or she is much more likely to click on an ad for New York hotels.
It's one weird trick, but man, is it a good trick.
This is very common and almost always predicted. 4 years is the end of the initial stock vest. If you don't get a major promotion, or even two, your compensation takes a nose dive. It's no wonder they left.
Companies like AAPL give refreshers especially to the key people. The fact that they left to GOOG most likely means that the search engine isn't that high on the priority list of Apple right now.
Apple isn't starting on the same planet in terms of infrastructure. The actual search stuff would be the tip of the iceberg in terms of what they need to build to get to parity with Google in search
Apple Maps took 10 years before it was usable and dare I say, it's actually better in many respects that Google Maps or Waze. The only reason why I use Waze is because I trust that they have better traffic and police updates. But Apple Maps navigation is much, much better with their "At the next stop sign, turn right", or "Make a u-turn at the next traffic lights." That's a really great way to navigate.
I hate it when a company hiring someone who used to work for a competitor is characterized poaching...
These are people with their own agency and the freedom to find a better situation if they can, and not the presumptive property of one company or another.
I for one support engineer rights and will only buy products produced with 100% free range talent. Ring fencing is inhumane. How are they supposed to get home to see their families?
Moreover, from a simplistic traditional economics perspective (which these companies love to tout so much) it's allegedly the most optimal / best thing for society as a whole when people leave jobs for higher-bids.
[Though in this case it's probably just perpetuating a search monopoly that is leading to a terrible user experience]
Except that Google can offer sufficient amounts of money to make it insane not to move. (Yes, I know Apple has deep pockets too).
I'm mostly curious here if they were hired back by Google because Google genuinely wants their talent, or if they just want to deprive Apple of their talent. Poached isn't a great word, but there's difference in intent in behavior.
Poach has a very specific meaning: illegally hunting animals which belong to someone else. That’s never the right word to describe someone taking a better job offer, but it’s especially inappropriate in a context of these two companies having a recent history of illegal wage-fixing.
And the third definition that you are conveniently ignoring is the one that matters here: "to attract (someone, such as an employee or customer) away from a competitor"[0]
I wonder if this pedantic nonsense on HN is ever going to stop? "Poach" is a perfectly fine word to use here, everyone knows exactly what it means, and for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
This one has essentially the same definition from your link. But notice the example usage: "They were furious when one of their best managers was poached by another company." Why furious? Because they feel someone took something belonging to them -- that is, the employment opportunity of person.
Here's another, where the most benign definition doesn't even make the list:
> for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
I'm not making an abstract point there. You must be unaware of the history of collusion between Apple and Google where they agreed not to poach each other's employees. There's your lack of agency. You can't choose an option that is withheld from you.
> [ T ] disapproving: to persuade someone who works for someone else to come and work for you
Again, that is the negative tone which people don't like: the idea that it's somehow infringing on the company's property rather than individuals freely engaging in normal activities. Part of why people are sensitive to that is that those same companies illegally colluded to prevent people from taking jobs, with lost wages measuring in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This didn't just come out of nowhere but is something which is in recent memory and directly or indirectly affected incomes for many people in the tech industry:
I won’t get into why, but in general the kind of people who frequent this forum (I.e. people with a natural proclivity towards computers) are very sensitive to “tongue in cheek” turns of phrase that don’t bother most other people.
You’re on the right side of history, because it is a stupid and somewhat insensitive thing to say, but just be aware that many people will be caught off guard by how much it impacts you, since they just see it as a cute joke.
You mean companies like Apple and Google specifically conspiring to suppress wages and cross-company hiring? Yeah, I can't imagine why people who could be impacted by that would be bothered by reporting that suggested that type of behavior was warranted.
No, I was trying to be polite in stating that the type of neurodivergence that makes people good hackers also generally leads them to have very strict and literal interpretations of language, whereas most other people are very comfortable with taking poetic license.
So things like this seems a lot more important to us than to gen pop.
And I was just trying to give a warning of that, since it is one of the key reasons why people like us are considered 'hard to talk to' (unless we take these warnings in stride and work to build coping mechanisms to lessen the impact).
Framing is not bothersome so much as it is informative. It's the writer's decision to use the word "poached", with all the connotations and implications that carries. But they shouldn't be given free reign to set that tone and tell that kind of story without defending their choices.
This is a remarkable story in how much of it is devoted to the facts to allow the reader to draw conclusions. The author doesn't do much moralizing on the migration of expertise and IP, on hiring, and on the nature of competition between large tech corps. It's mostly a statement that Google/Apple/these guys were working on some project relating to search, then something happened, then something else happened, now they're at Google presumably doing Google search things, leaving the reader to wonder what's left of their efforts at Apple.
They wrote "With long and involved projects like search, it's not uncommon for staff to move between Apple and Google. In 2018, the same year Apple bought Laserlike, it also poached John Giannandrea from Google." when they could also have written "Another example in 2018 was John Giannandrea's move from Google to Apple." without insinuating malfeasance, ownership, a failure of loyalty, or anything that the word choice "poached" carries.
> Framing is not bothersome so much as it is informative. It's the writer's decision to use the word "poached", with all the connotations and implications that carries. But they shouldn't be given free reign to set that tone and tell that kind of story without defending their choices.
My literally point is that it’s not informative but rather a common-use term meaning “hired away from a competitor”
I get that it should mean more than that, but to most people it doesn’t.
Poaching does not imply ownership of the "game". You shoot a deer on my property, hunting season or not, you are a poacher. In my area, hunters are required to acquire permission from landowners. I would not give anyone permission to shoot deer on my property. That does not make me the owner of the deer, just a limited temporary custodian until they decide to leave my property.
Willing to bet Google offered them seven figure bonuses to leave Apple's efforts high and dry. Google being the default search on iOS is one of the things holding their monopoly together.
Companies like Google often have several tiers of VP: VPs, Senior VPs, sometimes even Executive VPs, etc. It means that it's a manager very high in the hierarchy, but due to the company being big enough, there's non trivial amount of people like them among managers.
That's inaccurate. VP is a really high title, most likely your manager's manager is Sundar Pitchai or someone who reports to him. TC is in the millions of dollars for those people.
It's interesting to me that the American dialect pronounces route like rout, but never in the phrase en route, which is common enough that I've seen it frequently spelled "on route" by people who don't know not to.
I've heard a large number of non-native English speakers and British-English speakers pronounce "route" as "root". I can easily see an American-English speech-to-text or just American-English speakers choose "root" hearing one of these people pronouncing "route".
When I first heard "root" I got very confused because we were talking to Unix-adjacent stuff so I thought they were talking about the root user. Don't jump to conclusions.
When I was at Yahoo, I remember someone famous (either Jeremy Zawodny or Rasmus) running a query and discovering that there was something ridiculous like 20 employees for every VP. Maybe someone else on HN has better details or a better memory than me, but I remember being shocked at how top heavy it was, and it explained a lot of what I saw at Yahoo over the 4+ years I was there.
People always get excited over what Apple does. Supposedly Apple is working on an EV. And a VR headset. And a search engine. They're probably doing that and a whole lot more. It's called R&D. Apple doesn't want to be surprised by anything and their investors don't want Apple to miss opportunities.
So Apple runs a lot of projects to better understand the item in question, its manufacturing and/or maintenance, customer profiles, and so on.
What I read in a headline like this is Search was one of those items Apple has been researching. They've probably decided it's not worth their effort. The staff have learned that, whether officially or through the grapevine, and are now going back to a firm where search is worth their effort.
The news for us is Apple sees no viability in search, at least not in how we've become accustomed to thinking about search.
The news for us is Apple sees no viability in search, at least not in how we've become accustomed to thinking about search.
I don't think you can read much about Apple's strategy from this. Apple might well see search as an important priority, they just don't feel spending the sort of money necessary to keep these particular people around is the best way to get there.
According to an interview I watched recently, Steve Jobs wasn’t even sure they’d launch the iPhone a year before they did.
There’s a relatively well-known exchange where he flat-out tells an interviewer there’s no phone, and post-launch admits he was lying. The truth was in the middle - if they couldn’t control the product enough (due to then-standard carrier influence over design and experience), then they wouldn’t make a phone. Eventually they found a launch carrier that would let them do it.
If apple can’t make “the best search in the world” (by someone’s subjective definition), then they’ll never launch it. Simple as that.
Whereas Google will release something, get user traction and then try to make it 'best in the world'. If it doesn't get to world class status, then it cancels it and moves on, pissing off the early adopters in the process.
The problem is that this becomes counter-productive just like serial dramas in the TV world. If people think you're going to cancel something, they're not going to get emotionally invested in your product. Then it almost certainly gets canceled because it doesn't get enough user traction. Rinse. Repeat.
Apple will pull the plug on things that aren't panning out too though. The MacBook Pro's Touch Bar came and went in a pretty short period of time, for example.
Though I suppose in that specific example at least, the people whose trust was damaged are mainly developers who invested in building for it, and probably less so users who invested in learning it or relying on it. Maybe there are better, more Google-like examples where user/community trust bears the brunt of it.
From the perspective of employees it's also terrible to see the product being worked on for years get cancelled.
Sometimes there are no easy choices.
My takeaway is that Apple wants its customers to be happy even at the expense of its employees, but Google wants its employees to be happy (product launch => promotions) more than it wants its customers to.
It doesn't have to be "best in the world", just good enough and justifiable to themselves - many of the Apple in-house products kinda sucked when first released (I'm thinking of Apple Maps).
IMO, looking at the state of Siri, I'm not quite sure about that. Siri has always been not as good as alexa or google and has been getting worse over the years with weird ass bit flip bugs interpreting a 'turn off' as a 'turn on' or similar and the rest of the 'smart assistant' stuff throughout the OS usually not being very useful.
Probably true. I find all of them annoying almost to the point of uselessness though. I generally use them for some specific incantations like setting an alarm but mostly don’t even try to think of them as any sort of true voice assistants.
And none of that matters? As a product to do basic things like 'turn off lights' and 'whats the temperature' and such it fails horribly, while alexa and co at least are very reliable on the basics.
You can argue all you want that Google and Alexa have surpassed Siri but the thread is about Apple not launching poor products. Siri wasn’t a poor product, surpassed by Alexa and Google, at launch because they didn’t exist when Siri launched.
Siri was a lot better when it was being run by a tiny startup as opposed to once Apple started taking control of development isn’t much of a defense of Apple.
In fact, the Siri Apple released was significantly gimped compared to the Siri that was available on the App Store before Apple bought it.
> They've probably decided it's not worth their effort.
I think The Information's intel is probably true — that Apple is years away from launching web search product — but I don't think that means there's been any loss of momentum. Building a generalized search engine better than Google is hard.
We know that Apple absolutely bristles at dependencies for core capabilities. For now they'll continue to begrudgingly take Google's $15 billion/year, but Google will not be the default search engine for iOS by 2030. I can understand core team members not wanting to wait that long.
You don't have to build a search engine that is better than Google's - you may only need to build one that is roughly in the running and keep it around until such time as you have to divest from Google.
And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
With them working so much on building up their ad business, having a search engine and switching the iOS default search to it might make up for the loss in Google money they get right now.
Just like with Google Maps / Apple Maps it doesn't seem very Apple-like to depend on a partner this heavily for such a core feature.
The money doesn't come from search quality, it comes from selling ads and Apple is a long way away from building up ad inventory and an ad salesforce like Google's. They absolutely are making money on ads today, but they're a long way from swapping out Google.
Yeah, I suspect part of it is keeping an emergency option if Google were to not only stop paying them but actively blocking them (it's unlikely to happen, but if you have infinite money you're going to be paying to reduce unlikely risks).
Apple will start using their own search tools in smaller places that they can monetize better, I suspect, things like "Siri find a good restaurant".
> You don't have to build a search engine that is better than Google's…
You're right, of course — most companies would be happy with a "perfectly fine" DDG-like offering. I'm presupposing that "best" is Apple's bar for an M1-like slam dunk launch, since an underwhelming launch (think Apple Maps 1.0) can be hard to recover from.
> And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
For sure! Moonshots require a level of faith that I'm not sure could maintain for a decade either.
I think, much like maps, a search engine requires an iterative development process. I don't think you can reasonably launch either product (search nor maps) and surpass the quality of Google on day 1 because there is so much user feedback on both products which you can not capture without actual users. Apple, with Maps, has shown an ability to stick with things and iteratively grow them to be really great (Apple maps IMO now far surpasses google maps and except for some specific data layers it's far and above OSM).
It's a great point. Apple Maps was pretty rough when it launched but they've stuck with it and iteratively improved it. It's not like this is a self-driving car where you have to get it right and any mistake from the get-go can be fatal, so there's no reason not to apply the same iterative approach to search.
A colleague who trusted Apple Maps 1.0 a bit too much once found himself driving towards the edge of a cliff because his actual destination was at the bottom of that cliff down a mountain road. So yeah, maybe not at the same level as self driving cars but Apple Maps 1.0 could have been fatal for people less situationally aware than my colleague.
Apple Maps are plain useless. Google Maps are bad but bearable. OSM is miles ahead Apple Maps which is surprising because they could just pull data from OSM and not being that bad.
> I'm presupposing that "best" is Apple's bar for an M1-like slam dunk launch
Well Apple has been iterating Ax Series Chips, M1 is no different to previous A(n)X Chip. i.e M1 wasn't really a "launch" for the M Chip. And Search could easily have been something else in the mean time before a "Google" launch.
Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
> Well Apple has been iterating Ax Series Chips, M1 is no different to previous A(n)X Chip. i.e M1 wasn't really a "launch" for the M Chip.
Through an engineering lens, yes — one can look at the M1 SoC in a vacuum and characterize it as a logical evolutionary step in Apple's 20 years of silicon design. What made its introduction shocking (and its launch a slam dunk) is that Apple leveraged its experience in silicon design, OS design, hardware design, emulation, etc. to create new products, based on a completely new architecture for the desktop/laptop market, that definitively trounced their Intel-based predecessors.
You may have seen the clues before the M1 launched (which are crystal clear in retrospect), but for most people the unveiling of the M1 was as much a surprise as learning the identity of Keyser Söze.
> Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
Exactly! What will be "Apple Search" exists in a nascent state today, making its eventual launch as a branded product very analogous to the "develop secretly in plain sight" strategy Apple used for the M1.
General consensus in this thread seems to be it's better than Google now, and for me (at least) I never bother opening Google Maps anymore; I did often early on.
Rural is a huge issue and Apple surprisingly seems to actually respond and fix issues - I reported one once and it was fixed the next time I bothered to check, so good on them.
Google still routes you to the middle of a cornfield there, and I don't know how to get that fixed.
That may be true in the US, but for example in Berlin, cycling directions are still unavailable and POI search is still behind google maps. I would prefer to use Apple Maps, but it’s lacking.
There’s also no way to share a route with someone else.
Very much dependent on the country. Where they have rolled out their “new” maps based on their own mapping (and not licensing a mix of others like TomTom), they are much much better than people think.
In Australia, I rarely go for Google Maps anymore. Apple Maps search and driving UI is cleaner, the LookAround streetview equivalent is great, and spoken directions are more natural. Google Maps still has the edge in business location data though - like finding “a barber nearby”. As more people use it, it’s clear Apple Maps is catching up there too.
But when I was in southern Europe, which I guess haven’t been upgraded yet, I found they’re a long way behind Google Maps in terms of routing, detail map data, and updates to business locations.
>Building a generalized search engine better than Google is hard.
True, however, through a combination of advances of general tech/stack accessibility over the long term, and regressions in Google's feature set in search in respecting a user's specific query, and falling victim to its own SEO-anti-SEO cat-and-mouse, the thirst for a search input box that can respect the anything more than the very most basic "advanced options" grows. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the growing gap between "show me 10 links that have something vaguely to do with <str> that have been hyper-gamified with next-gen DL personalization" and "SQL for the whole internet". This feels like a ripe field for apple. Probably the hardest part would be branding. Apple search could imply just local or user-uploaded files. Apple web search sounds like it's for geezers. iSearch is too on the nose. Binoculars would tie it too much to Safari.
While I think the HN audience is definitely on the 'SQL for the internet' side of that gradient I don't think very many people (on the scale of the whole internet) are at all interested in that. I think if you were to graph the level of 'nuts and bolts' level interest among internet users it would follow an exponential decay and I don't see that turning around any time in the future.
The internet is not for tinkerers any more, it's for regular humans with regular human interests. We had our brief, glorious time when the internet was for people who liked to know how things work. That time is over and I don't think there's much money to be made targeting that market in general search. The average person not only doesn't mind if they see listicles in their results, they often look at them!
No? I think that's exactly Apple's usual market - sell some hardware with (maybe) some small difference, attach some marketing mystique to it, and sell it for a premium.
I can’t think of any new apple product launch in the last 15 years, since the iPhone, that had only a small difference in hardware compared to incumbent offerings. With the exception of Beats and some accessories.
Even some of their dongles were groundbreaking, like the lightning to hdmi video adaptor with a full ARM computer inside to compress and decompress the video stream in real time.
I was at Google, although not in Search. Search-adjacent, you might say.
Like Maps, it's much, much harder than it looks. They have whole teams that concentrate on one particular vertical, and there are a lot of verticals.
That said: they're also heavily invested in solving problems of 15 years ago that have gone away. Someone taking a fresh look can probably do a lot better, but it would take enormous resources. It would make more sense to build "what Search is going to be" rather than "a better version of what's already been done."
Google is paying apple $14 billion a year to not build a search engine. Gotta be hard for them to say no to that, and even more cynically having a team building a google competitor probably helped them negotiate a bigger bribe from Google.
Google is paying for default IOS search eyeballs. That's it. It would make zero sense to be paying Apple billions a year "to not build a search engine" when Apple is openly working on Search. Search is also ridiculously hard with the constant battle against SEO/Spam industry so I don't think Google is worried about a similar platform. Bing is 13 yrs old and has 3% market share. Where they are actually probably worried about losing search usage is social outlets like Tiktok and Reddit where people look for answers.
I'm pretty sure this is a self inflicted injury. Google started relying on metadata as a signal for its search algo and the SEO war was on.
1. Nothing is forcing Apple or any other search engine maker to use the same signals
2. In any case, the era of general purpose web search seems to be ending - most things we care about is in walled gardens like Insta or WhatsApp. E.g., millions of people get their Ukraine war news from Telegram channels which Google is blind to.
Any general purpose search engine is hoovering up less and less relevant content
Apple is already doing search on a huge scale and will continue doing it -- that's what the "Siri Suggested website" is that shows up when you type in Safari's search bar, on both iOS and the Mac. It's under the radar a bit, but it is absolutely the same search.
You're extrapolating a lot from just a title. Apple has had various search engines and crawlers for almost a decade now. Their first major investment was the Topsy's acquisition, in 2013. They've continued to invest through acquisitions and organic growth to reduce their reliance on Google Search. There is no indication that Apple will stop.
Apple doing R&D doesn't mean Apple won't ever make a search engine, electric car, or VR headset. It means that Apple is waiting to get a mature enough product in any of these areas to create one.
If you want to see how hyping products before they are fully mature can go wrong, look at Meta and Horizon Worlds.
"Many people" is an understatement. A VP will normally have a couple hundred people reporting up to them. Google has 30-40K engineers, so one can do the math. There are 100+ VPs at Google. Plus SVPs, EVPs, presidents, even a few CEOs.
Based on my experiences in the iOS app store, Apple desperately needs search tuning. Searching for a specific product sometimes yields 3rd party tutorial apps for the product but not the product itself. Following a link from the developer's web site will get me to the product itself.
Amusingly enough, later the same day this occurred, the product in question was featured in an ad banner on the App store.
There are certain apps on my phone that iOS spotlight search doesn’t find even if I type their names out in full. But if I search for them in the App Library, they are found.
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadSearch does not require advertising.
Advertising is probably the simplest way to monetize search. Certainly other strategies could be tried, but that one at least is well understood, and nigh-ubiquitous.
It could also just be sold as a service, or an addition to iCloud+.
If there is an opportunity to increase revenue (subject to mission/values/etc), you take it. A decrease in another line of business doesn’t matter. Or an increase; you wouldn’t say “hey we’ve got this amazing ad opportunity but the AirPods business is killing it so let’s not bother.”
I guess the nuance here is that the business decision might be “our search, with our ads” versus “Google’s search, with their ads, plus $15B/year”. In that case I think there’s a reasonable argument that users are better off with Apple’s ads than Google’s.
If someone searches for "hotels new york" you have what's called a motivated customer. He or she is much more likely to click on an ad for New York hotels.
It's one weird trick, but man, is it a good trick.
I hate it when a company hiring someone who used to work for a competitor is characterized poaching...
These are people with their own agency and the freedom to find a better situation if they can, and not the presumptive property of one company or another.
[Though in this case it's probably just perpetuating a search monopoly that is leading to a terrible user experience]
I'm mostly curious here if they were hired back by Google because Google genuinely wants their talent, or if they just want to deprive Apple of their talent. Poached isn't a great word, but there's difference in intent in behavior.
I wonder if this pedantic nonsense on HN is ever going to stop? "Poach" is a perfectly fine word to use here, everyone knows exactly what it means, and for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poach
It retains the implication of unfairly taking or appropriating something belonging to someone else.
Read every other definition on the page you linked.
Here are some more:
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/poach
This one has essentially the same definition from your link. But notice the example usage: "They were furious when one of their best managers was poached by another company." Why furious? Because they feel someone took something belonging to them -- that is, the employment opportunity of person.
Here's another, where the most benign definition doesn't even make the list:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/poach
> for the love of god it's not depriving anyone of any "agency."
I'm not making an abstract point there. You must be unaware of the history of collusion between Apple and Google where they agreed not to poach each other's employees. There's your lack of agency. You can't choose an option that is withheld from you.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
https://www.ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=poach
> To take or appropriate unfairly or illegally: poaching another firm's best employees.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach?q=...
> [ T ] disapproving: to persuade someone who works for someone else to come and work for you
Again, that is the negative tone which people don't like: the idea that it's somehow infringing on the company's property rather than individuals freely engaging in normal activities. Part of why people are sensitive to that is that those same companies illegally colluded to prevent people from taking jobs, with lost wages measuring in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This didn't just come out of nowhere but is something which is in recent memory and directly or indirectly affected incomes for many people in the tech industry:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
You’re on the right side of history, because it is a stupid and somewhat insensitive thing to say, but just be aware that many people will be caught off guard by how much it impacts you, since they just see it as a cute joke.
You mean companies like Apple and Google specifically conspiring to suppress wages and cross-company hiring? Yeah, I can't imagine why people who could be impacted by that would be bothered by reporting that suggested that type of behavior was warranted.
So things like this seems a lot more important to us than to gen pop.
And I was just trying to give a warning of that, since it is one of the key reasons why people like us are considered 'hard to talk to' (unless we take these warnings in stride and work to build coping mechanisms to lessen the impact).
This is a remarkable story in how much of it is devoted to the facts to allow the reader to draw conclusions. The author doesn't do much moralizing on the migration of expertise and IP, on hiring, and on the nature of competition between large tech corps. It's mostly a statement that Google/Apple/these guys were working on some project relating to search, then something happened, then something else happened, now they're at Google presumably doing Google search things, leaving the reader to wonder what's left of their efforts at Apple.
They wrote "With long and involved projects like search, it's not uncommon for staff to move between Apple and Google. In 2018, the same year Apple bought Laserlike, it also poached John Giannandrea from Google." when they could also have written "Another example in 2018 was John Giannandrea's move from Google to Apple." without insinuating malfeasance, ownership, a failure of loyalty, or anything that the word choice "poached" carries.
My literally point is that it’s not informative but rather a common-use term meaning “hired away from a competitor”
I get that it should mean more than that, but to most people it doesn’t.
edit: whoops
Google has dozens of “VPs of engineering”.
P.S. According to levels.fyi (https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Bloomberg,Amazon&trac...) Google has only VPs and SVPs, not EVPs.
It doesn't, because there are so many of them. Looking at this for example: https://www.zippia.com/google-careers-24972/salary/vice-pres... I wouldn't say VP ranks very high at Google.
I don't think anyone proofreads anymore. "rooted" is a word in the dictionary, so it passes the automated checker.
When I first heard "root" I got very confused because we were talking to Unix-adjacent stuff so I thought they were talking about the root user. Don't jump to conclusions.
So Apple runs a lot of projects to better understand the item in question, its manufacturing and/or maintenance, customer profiles, and so on.
What I read in a headline like this is Search was one of those items Apple has been researching. They've probably decided it's not worth their effort. The staff have learned that, whether officially or through the grapevine, and are now going back to a firm where search is worth their effort.
The news for us is Apple sees no viability in search, at least not in how we've become accustomed to thinking about search.
I don't think you can read much about Apple's strategy from this. Apple might well see search as an important priority, they just don't feel spending the sort of money necessary to keep these particular people around is the best way to get there.
There’s a relatively well-known exchange where he flat-out tells an interviewer there’s no phone, and post-launch admits he was lying. The truth was in the middle - if they couldn’t control the product enough (due to then-standard carrier influence over design and experience), then they wouldn’t make a phone. Eventually they found a launch carrier that would let them do it.
If apple can’t make “the best search in the world” (by someone’s subjective definition), then they’ll never launch it. Simple as that.
Whereas Google will release something, get user traction and then try to make it 'best in the world'. If it doesn't get to world class status, then it cancels it and moves on, pissing off the early adopters in the process.
The problem is that this becomes counter-productive just like serial dramas in the TV world. If people think you're going to cancel something, they're not going to get emotionally invested in your product. Then it almost certainly gets canceled because it doesn't get enough user traction. Rinse. Repeat.
Though I suppose in that specific example at least, the people whose trust was damaged are mainly developers who invested in building for it, and probably less so users who invested in learning it or relying on it. Maybe there are better, more Google-like examples where user/community trust bears the brunt of it.
Sometimes there are no easy choices. My takeaway is that Apple wants its customers to be happy even at the expense of its employees, but Google wants its employees to be happy (product launch => promotions) more than it wants its customers to.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/executive-reportedly-fired-ap...
Alexa launched in 2014 and Google Assistant in 2016.
Siri has not always been ‘not as good as Alexa or Google’, it existed way before either of them were released.
In fact, the Siri Apple released was significantly gimped compared to the Siri that was available on the App Store before Apple bought it.
I’m at the point where I wonder whether they flagged me as a bad person, on which they make Siri do the opposite of what I ask.
I think The Information's intel is probably true — that Apple is years away from launching web search product — but I don't think that means there's been any loss of momentum. Building a generalized search engine better than Google is hard.
We know that Apple absolutely bristles at dependencies for core capabilities. For now they'll continue to begrudgingly take Google's $15 billion/year, but Google will not be the default search engine for iOS by 2030. I can understand core team members not wanting to wait that long.
And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
Just like with Google Maps / Apple Maps it doesn't seem very Apple-like to depend on a partner this heavily for such a core feature.
Apple will start using their own search tools in smaller places that they can monetize better, I suspect, things like "Siri find a good restaurant".
You're right, of course — most companies would be happy with a "perfectly fine" DDG-like offering. I'm presupposing that "best" is Apple's bar for an M1-like slam dunk launch, since an underwhelming launch (think Apple Maps 1.0) can be hard to recover from.
> And working for years on a project that may never see the light of day can be hard.
For sure! Moonshots require a level of faith that I'm not sure could maintain for a decade either.
Well Apple has been iterating Ax Series Chips, M1 is no different to previous A(n)X Chip. i.e M1 wasn't really a "launch" for the M Chip. And Search could easily have been something else in the mean time before a "Google" launch.
Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
Through an engineering lens, yes — one can look at the M1 SoC in a vacuum and characterize it as a logical evolutionary step in Apple's 20 years of silicon design. What made its introduction shocking (and its launch a slam dunk) is that Apple leveraged its experience in silicon design, OS design, hardware design, emulation, etc. to create new products, based on a completely new architecture for the desktop/laptop market, that definitively trounced their Intel-based predecessors.
You may have seen the clues before the M1 launched (which are crystal clear in retrospect), but for most people the unveiling of the M1 was as much a surprise as learning the identity of Keyser Söze.
> Apple already does a lot of "Searching" with Siri Suggestions. And arguably it is the 2nd largest search engine on the planet.
Exactly! What will be "Apple Search" exists in a nascent state today, making its eventual launch as a branded product very analogous to the "develop secretly in plain sight" strategy Apple used for the M1.
Google maps had been a pain point coming from a pretty rural area, Apple does not have this problem.
Google still routes you to the middle of a cornfield there, and I don't know how to get that fixed.
There’s also no way to share a route with someone else.
https://www.apple.com/au/newsroom/2021/12/apple-rolls-out-al...
In Australia, I rarely go for Google Maps anymore. Apple Maps search and driving UI is cleaner, the LookAround streetview equivalent is great, and spoken directions are more natural. Google Maps still has the edge in business location data though - like finding “a barber nearby”. As more people use it, it’s clear Apple Maps is catching up there too.
But when I was in southern Europe, which I guess haven’t been upgraded yet, I found they’re a long way behind Google Maps in terms of routing, detail map data, and updates to business locations.
True, however, through a combination of advances of general tech/stack accessibility over the long term, and regressions in Google's feature set in search in respecting a user's specific query, and falling victim to its own SEO-anti-SEO cat-and-mouse, the thirst for a search input box that can respect the anything more than the very most basic "advanced options" grows. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the growing gap between "show me 10 links that have something vaguely to do with <str> that have been hyper-gamified with next-gen DL personalization" and "SQL for the whole internet". This feels like a ripe field for apple. Probably the hardest part would be branding. Apple search could imply just local or user-uploaded files. Apple web search sounds like it's for geezers. iSearch is too on the nose. Binoculars would tie it too much to Safari.
The internet is not for tinkerers any more, it's for regular humans with regular human interests. We had our brief, glorious time when the internet was for people who liked to know how things work. That time is over and I don't think there's much money to be made targeting that market in general search. The average person not only doesn't mind if they see listicles in their results, they often look at them!
Even some of their dongles were groundbreaking, like the lightning to hdmi video adaptor with a full ARM computer inside to compress and decompress the video stream in real time.
Like Maps, it's much, much harder than it looks. They have whole teams that concentrate on one particular vertical, and there are a lot of verticals.
That said: they're also heavily invested in solving problems of 15 years ago that have gone away. Someone taking a fresh look can probably do a lot better, but it would take enormous resources. It would make more sense to build "what Search is going to be" rather than "a better version of what's already been done."
For the public, web search is just text-mode siri/alexa
Definitely going to put this on my quote wall for later, thank you! I love seeing inspiring confidence.
I'm pretty sure this is a self inflicted injury. Google started relying on metadata as a signal for its search algo and the SEO war was on.
1. Nothing is forcing Apple or any other search engine maker to use the same signals
2. In any case, the era of general purpose web search seems to be ending - most things we care about is in walled gardens like Insta or WhatsApp. E.g., millions of people get their Ukraine war news from Telegram channels which Google is blind to.
Any general purpose search engine is hoovering up less and less relevant content
If you want to see how hyping products before they are fully mature can go wrong, look at Meta and Horizon Worlds.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
LOL. Many people have that title at Google, there is not only one.
[EDIT. Scrolling way down I see I was not the first to point this out. At least two of my friends have had that title at some point there. ]
I was amazed my first week when I, a lowly support drone, had a meeting THE vice president of Goldman Sachs. My boss laughed and explained...
Amusingly enough, later the same day this occurred, the product in question was featured in an ad banner on the App store.
$18B for not building a search engine doesn’t sound like a bad deal.
Odd.