Apple’s Search Engine: What Would it Look Like?
Dominated by Google, Apple Might Soon Set Foot in the Search Engine Wars to Claim a Piece of the Pie.
Apple already has a search engine.
When you use the Spotlight search on the iPhone or macOS, you are technically asking your device to run through an index on your phone and return with results matching your query.
That’s exactly what a search engine does, except for every website, tweet, and image on the Internet.
When you type something in the search bar, macOS and iOS search for that item on your iPhone or Mac under documents, apps, photos, music, and within apps, for example, the news apps. So you can find what you’re looking for with ease.
Without a search engine, you would lose your mind.
Imagine you had to look through millions of web pages on an excel sheet one by one and judge by its name whether or not it contains the information you need.
That’s where search engines swoop in to save the day. With their indexing algorithms, every newly published website is added to a collection of websites.
A web crawler then goes through each web page’s code to understand what the content is about, its ranking, and so on.
When you search for something, it gets you results relating to what you searched for. Each search engine has a slightly different algorithm and shows somewhat different results when searching for the same thing.
This is why we feel that one search engine is better than the other.
Other Than Google
Yes, you heard me right. There are other search engines other than Google. Although Google has become the gold standard for surfing the Internet, so much that it’s now a verb, there are plenty of search engines other than Google.
Some of them are Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, and StartPage.
You’ve probably never heard of most of them, and that’s alright.
Google has made it very easy for anyone to access it, but the others haven’t. In fact, Google pays billions of dollars to Apple to make it the default search engine on iPhones and Macs.
Now that Apple is a Two Trillion dollar company, these billions are not as crucial as having their own search engine.
Apple always prides itself on the privacy and security they maintain on the iPhone. But if every time you search for something on the web you search through Google, there’s no guarantee your privacy is preserved.
When you use Google’s search engine, it’s not just one program you’re running; Google runs many scripts in the background to make it easy for your browser to show you results and ads based on your account history and past purchases.
When you log-in to a website, they know it’s you because there’s a good chance you used “Sign in with Google.” After all, it’s so convenient. Or you’re logged in to YouTube or Gmail.
Consequently, this allows Google to track you on the web and defeats the whole point of Apple’s privacy pitch.
Granted, Apple has put in measures to prevent cross-site tracking, which is when the trackers on one website can look at and interact with trackers on other websites to establish a connection and transfer data.
Unfortunately, with Google’s various techniques, they can bypass this easily and use different methods of identifying ‘who is searching for what’ on the Internet, making Apple’s efforts worthless in this area.
But that’s just Google. Some of the other search engines, such as DuckDuckGo, focus on privacy over the top.
For instance, when you search for a YouTube video and click on one from the search results, it asks you if you want to allow the video playback. That’s because trackers and other domains are linked to it, ready to find out who you are.
This is great in terms of privacy because you know that they are tracking you, and you could allow or disallow it. But herein lies the problem, convenience.
Ease of Use
Ask any iPhone or Mac user why they think iOS is better than Android and macOS is better than Windows.
Most of them, well, at least the ones who have used both, will tell you how easy it is to use Apple’s software over Windows and Android.
Yes, many features in the other two lack in Apple’s OS, but Apple has got it figured out in terms of ease of use.
Some of the most popular apps run better on iOS than Android. Although this is because there are fewer iPhone models and Apple’s developer kits are more refined, the outcome is still appreciable.
If Apple wanted to include privacy features like DuckDuckGo, they would have to make it easy to use, which I’m confident they will.
Quality of Search Results
I have used DuckDuckGo a lot, and let me tell you; I keep switching back to Google. Why? It’s simple. The search results are way better.
I didn’t always get the most relevant websites when I used DuckDuckGo. They were just not that great when compared to the results shown on Google.
A large part of that is due to Google’s biggest advantage over other search engines — Data.
Almost everyone who owns a smartphone, laptop, or tablet uses Google to surf the Internet.
This provides Google with a practically unlimited stream of data that they track and analyze, which is extremely fundamental for Machine Learning. A.k.a. Artificial Intelligence (the fancier name).
Data and Machine Learning
When I stated how you get results based on your history and data collected about you, this is how Google does it.
Google’s Algorithm learns from your activity on the Internet about you, your personality, what you like, what makes you want to buy a particular product, etc. This data is used to give you “relevant ads,” as they call it.
But with that data, there are other types of uses as well.
If you are someone who continually looks for tutorials or searches for programming related concepts, Google understands that you’re either a student or a developer.
An excellent example of this would be Google’s Foobar Challenge. It’s a secret test for developers; A game that is sent to select users to play, allowing them to take part in challenges.
Some of the top participants on the leaderboard get offed a job at Google. That’s amazing!
But the point here is how Google can use data to learn things about you that you might never expect.
Apple needs this same type of data to make its algorithms better.
But the market share of all of Apple’s devices compared to Google’s presence is noticeably inadequate. It’s the same reason Siri has not caught up with Google’s Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa in terms of functionality and flexibility.
Fewer data points would pressure Apple’s team to make the algorithms as efficient and accurate as possible before training them with data. This explains Apple’s new job postings for search engine experts.
Let’s say Apple manages to secure the crème de la crème, but that’s not enough to replace the convenience Google has to offer.
Luckily, Apple has a great trick up its sleeve.
Experience
Spotlight is arguably one of the best on-device search engines. You can find anything on your Mac or iPhone using spotlight search.
I feel the macOS counterpart is more useful, but that’s just my opinion. You can find any document or document contents by searching for it and find it fast.
It works great as a search tool for your Mac, but it is not the best to search the Internet.
On the Internet-related side of things, it shows search results from Siri’s recommended websites, but it’s not the most reliable. It’s usually a hit or a miss but never consistent.
Spotlight works so well for an on-device search because it can index all the data on your Mac.
If only Apple had an index of everything on the web, they could pull off one of the best search engines.
What do you wonder? They do, or at least are in the process of doing.
Apple’s webcrawler, Applebot, has been at work for a long time and has recently been more actively gathering data.
With an index of the entire Internet, they could produce relevant websites based on your search queries, just like Google.
Apple’s implementation will stand out because it can display the information requested in the spotlight window without needing to visit the website.
Safari — Apple’s Browser
One of Safari’s most notable features is the reader’s view of websites with text and images. This mode allows you to view only text and pictures for a cleaner browsing experience, especially when the content is surrounded by a gallery of Ads.
Apple can and does use this to show information from some websites like Wikipedia among a few others.
Getting the same experience for web browsing would make the feature so much more lovable and accessible.
You don’t even need to load all the search results. As you’re typing the query on the search bar, Apple will show you the relevant information from the most suitable website.
Look up
Another Great tool in Apple’s toolbelt is Look up. As the name suggests, you can look up any text or link to get the definition, directions, or even a website’s preview.
You can currently use Look up to find the meaning of a word, synonyms from the thesaurus, or even a description from Wikipedia. Also, you can preview a website link and then decide if you want to visit it.
This is one of the most versatile tools, in my opinion, and has a lot of potential use cases.
Let’s say you see the name of a restaurant and you want to reserve a table.
All you have to do is Force touch, or three-finger tap if you have the older trackpads, on the name, and you will get directions to the nearest outlet, a button to book your table, contact options, and more; all on the small popup window.
We have seen all this on a Google search page with Google Maps integration but to do all that on a small window without even opening a web browser is heights of convenience.
Before you jump at me and say that the feature already exists, which it does, I want to let you know that it’s hard to identify Apple as the winner when you put it up against Google’s implementation.
Most of the time, there isn’t sufficient information to let you proceed to the next step.
Takeaway
If Apple ever comes out with its search engine, which seems likely, they would make sure it is a strong competitor for Google from the start, unlike what they did with Google Maps vs. Apple Maps.
It would be alright if they failed initially but slowly gathered enough data to make it a valuable search engine, prioritizing accuracy, privacy, and convenience.
