Thu 29 October 2020:
Apple has accelerated work to develop its own search engine that would allow the iPhone maker to offer an alternative to Google, a Financial Times report said Wednesday.
The report, citing unnamed sources, said signs of the search engine technology have begun to appeal in its iOS 14 operating system.
The move comes amid increased scrutiny by antitrust enforcers, who sued Google in the United States over its dominance in search technology.
As part of the lawsuit, the Department of Justice noted that Google pays Apple billions of dollars to be the principal search engine on iOS devices.
The company hired Google’s head of search, John Giannnandrea, over two years ago and has been openly recruiting search engineers since, to the point where Apple has a “credible team” to “build a more general search engine”, according to a former Google engineering chief, Bill Coughran, who spoke to the FT.
According to the FT, Apple two years ago hired Google’s head of search, John Giannandrea, in a move designed to help build artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant.
An Apple search engine would almost certainly have one massive selling point: increased user privacy.
Apple has made great efforts to distance itself from rivals in recent years by insisting that “privacy is a fundamental human right” and “one of our core values”. Like rivals such as DuckDuckGo, Apple may attempt to build a search engine that doesn’t store personal information nor track users across the web.
That would be easier for Apple because, unlike Google, it’s not reliant on advertising income, which benefits from personalized data with which to target users.
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