https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/technology/google-apple-search-spotlight.html
Google has worried for years that Apple would one day expand its internet search technology, and has been working on ways to prevent that from happening.
Defeat the competition by making a good product yourself?? I don't think so! Stifling innovation is the only way to succeed!
Anyone who never got a chance to use Google Now back in the day really missed out! One of Google's most useful products to date. It would provide you with the most useful/timely information before you even knew you needed it. Word is, it was so useful that people stopped needing to actively use Google's services to get the info they needed so they scrapped it. Bastards.
Yes, I remember that! I recall thinking, imagine how good this will get in the future. Sadly it didn't.
I remember when you could find what you were looking for by googling it. Those were good days. Seriously though, google search, google maps and many other google products simply do not work anymore. They deliberately removed functionality for short term monetary gain and have lost the dominance they once had simply due to their products not working the way they did 10 years ago.
They have no interest in making search better. When 2 out of every 3 searches go through your platform either way, good results lead to fewer page loads which results in lost ad revenue. How are they going to afford to pay Apple $18 billion/year if everyone is getting the info they need?
Google is still the best in my experience, at least for stuff I search for. As long as they’re just slightly better what reason do they have to improve?
Yeah this is the issue. I've been trying DDG and while it's got less bloat it's either the same as Google or less accurate 99% of the time. There are times I was searching for something I had found before and had to switch back to Google because it wasn't coming up in DDG
Trying to get back to Google after a few years on DDG then Qwant felt really off. Kagi was the real deal for me but it is still to expensive for the average consumer 😕
My first few experiences with Kagi were good, on par with Google, but my latest weren't. Especially in my local language.
$5 is too expensive? People have $1,200 phones on financing, buy $5 coffee on the way to work, still drive gasoline vehicles when fuel is $4-6 (in the states) to go ~20 miles, pay $16 for Netflix... like whut? Shit, I'm disabled and living off social security and I still found room in my budget for $5.
As a very aware consumer I think it's fair, but a larger audience would be hard to convince :
To convince someone to use Kagi, you must change their mind about these three points, and then convince them to spend 60$/year for it.
Yeah I'm talking about the kind of people who are here, on Lemmy - not the grandma that uses Facebook as 'the internet search'. The people who are aware of current trends and events in tech. I've given up trying to educate people who don't give two shits - life is too damn short.
My last experiences with Google were non-trivial privacy policy consent request popups that made me leave.
The one before was having to clean up my mother's laptop after she installed a popular FOSS program from a search result ad infested with ad and malware.
Yeah there was just an article on ars about malware from an ad pretending to be keepass.
would be nice if somebody was serious about search considering Google has all but abandoned it
I agree. However Apple might be trading evil for evil. I wish the Wikimedia Foundation or similar would take on search.
This is my concern. That Apple just forcefully uses its dominance while it still argues its "smaller" than the necessary theeshold for competititive dominance or at least that it remains smaller than like Google and Microsoft in terms of its market share of whatever category()
If they were to enter search, they would exploit their dominant iPhone market position (at least in the US).
Eh, wiki has its own skeletons and is too politically motivated to provide actual search results.
Plenty people and products are serious about search.
It's just that Google is so dominant and established, it's not gonna just disappear or be replaced on a grand scale.
It's kinda hard imagining Apple getting into search with how squeaky clean they tend to be about things. Like... picture an Apple search engine returning porn results. Just doesn't really compute.
Apple got into search years ago, though. If you search in Safari, Apple will provide a single top result (if it has one) above your selected search engine results. Search for a famous person from history and you'll most likely get a Wikipedia link at the top with the picture and small excerpt. This is powered by Apple's own search engine. It's not limited to Wikipedia either but is powered by their Applebot web crawler. If you want to be able to see more than one result, you can use the Spotlight search by swiping down on the home screen. Depending on your search term you'll have a Websites section with multiple results from their search engine.
What Apple doesn't offer is a web page for you to access their search engine. Even without it, though, many millions of people have been using Apple's search engine for years now, clicking on the results usually without even realizing that's where it came from.
Interesting I hadn't heard that before. I wonder how sanitized, if at all, those search results are.
Just for you I did a couple of quick searches and discovered something extraordinary. I'll leave out most of the specific terms I tried but basically anything for an explicit topic just doesn't have web results at all. It merely offers to search in the browser using your default search engine.
"Masturbation" also had no Apple web results but pulled up a Shortcuts result with the option to turn on the "Do Not Disturb Focus"!
Cool of you to go to the trouble. Not super surprising that'd be the result. Really makes you wonder how Apple would approach having a proper search competitor to Google.
Go change your default search engine on Apple. It’s real easy, I have mine set to DuckDuckGo but they have tons of options that I’ve never heard of.
I was hoping NYT dug up something actually sketchy, but the contents of this article are a nothingburger.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
At the same time, Google studied how to pry open Apple’s control of the iPhone by leveraging a new European law intended to help small companies compete with Big Tech.
It also provides insight into the company’s complex relationship with Apple, a competitor in consumer gadgets and software that has been an instrumental partner in Google’s mobile ads business for more than a decade.
Last fall, Google executives met to discuss how to reduce the company’s reliance on Apple’s Safari browser and how best to use a new law in Europe to undermine the iPhone maker, documents showed.
At the time, the European Union was readying the Digital Markets Act, which was designed to help smaller companies crack Big Tech’s control of the industry.
regulators to crack open Apple’s tightly controlled software ecosystem so Google could siphon users from Safari and Spotlight, the documents showed.
Regulations intended to help smaller companies enter the marketplace “very frequently can also be used by incumbents to gain advantage over their rivals,” Gus Hurwitz, a senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School who focuses on technology and competition, said in an interview.
The original article contains 1,180 words, the summary contains 191 words. Saved 84%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!