Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the answer! Couldn't Apple crawl the web and store the index for safari to search through? This way, an iPhone user would search Apple's index instead of Bing's, no website needed.
If I understand your question, the answer is that what you describe is basically the same thing currently on Android phones with the Google search widget thing (I think it's called Google Now). It can perform a search without going to Google's main search page. It may or may not open the results in a browser window, though (I don't know because I don't use it). But regardless, it goes through Google's main search sys…
>I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google
Yes, that is what i was trying to get at!
>Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you should also be concerned with Apple.
Definitely!
>Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way.
I'm just curious if there's a business opportunity for Apple here. They could basically make mobile safari switch to the hypothetical "Apple Search" for queries made in Safari's address bar (I personally don't search from google.com). It would of course only be worth anything to the end user if they saved time not being routed through google.com
In a similar vein, I've read some comments describing "Siri" as a way to get a bite of the web-search-cake.