Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 224 posts

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#21

Post by IBM »

beaner wrote: post #7
lemoncucumber wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could almost see Apple buying DuckDuckGo, given that a) Apple cares about their users' privacy, and b) Apple cares about having control over the entire user experience. DuckDuckGo would fit right in with both of those core pieces of Apple (no pun intended). I don't think it'll actually happen, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Apple doesn't care about it's users' privacy. It only ever started making a big deal about privacy when people started criticizing Google for hoarding too much personal info and using it to target ads, which people think is evil. Apple doesn't do these things (it's not Apple's business model), so they began heavily marketing "privacy" as something you'd get from them and not the competition. They make sort of okay at…

Apple was good about privacy and security long before they ever started talking about it. They only started talking about it after the celeb "iCloud hack" (which turned out not to be an iCloud vulnerability [1]).

The fact that they market privacy and security is a good thing if you care about those things. Previously you were just relying on their business model being different from Google's or Microsoft's, but now they're on the record (repeatedly) which also sets them up for a PR crisis if they back down from those positions.

There are plenty of Apple haters that would jump at the opportunity.

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2016/03/17/opinion-apple-pr-allegations/

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#22

Post by m_mueller »

elaus wrote: post #16
andy_ppp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the amount of data Apple has from Siri I’m constantly surprised they don’t at least have a stab at building a search engine, possibly one with very fine grained privacy/accuracy controls.

I don't think Apple does "fine grained controls"

For the specific context of privacy, they have had more fine-grained controls than Android since the inception of the appstore, until release of Android 6.0 where Android AFAIK has caught up.

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#24

Post by randkyp »

0xbear wrote: post #17
dmead wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that true? i thought DDG predates bing?

I believe they initially used Google as their backend. Don't quote me on that though. One thing I know for sure is their search is not really provided by them.

I thought their search was powered by Yahoo's BOSS service combined with their own crawler.

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#25

Post by willtim »

rtpg wrote: post #18
beaner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't care about it's users' privacy. It only ever started making a big deal about privacy when people started criticizing Google for hoarding too much personal info and using it to target ads, which people think is evil. Apple doesn't do these things (it's not Apple's business model), so they began heavily marketing "privacy" as something you'd get from them and not the competition. They make sort of okay at…

They also made a political stand on the search warrant for that one iPhone that they could have unlocked. A stand that wasn't even popular among the general public ("companies should help police investigate terrorists" polls very well). Being super pedantic, Apple doesn't care about anything, just like a company can't care... but I think it's safe to say that it's not last on the list of things they prioritize.

It seemed more like a marketing stunt to me. The issue was about a single iPhone with a warrant to search it. Apple made it a very public debate about all iPhones.

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#26

Post by millstone »

beaner wrote: post #7
lemoncucumber wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could almost see Apple buying DuckDuckGo, given that a) Apple cares about their users' privacy, and b) Apple cares about having control over the entire user experience. DuckDuckGo would fit right in with both of those core pieces of Apple (no pun intended). I don't think it'll actually happen, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched.

Apple doesn't care about it's users' privacy. It only ever started making a big deal about privacy when people started criticizing Google for hoarding too much personal info and using it to target ads, which people think is evil. Apple doesn't do these things (it's not Apple's business model), so they began heavily marketing "privacy" as something you'd get from them and not the competition. They make sort of okay at…

Disagree strongly. Apple pays a serious price for their privacy stance, which they would rather not pay. Doing machine learning on-device makes it less effective. Apple's directions aren't as good as they could be because Maps randomly segments trips and masks its users identity. Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.

This difference is deeper than business models. Compare Google's Hands Free with Apple Pay for example: the same business model (collecting interchange fees) but Apple's approach preserves user's privacy at the cost of some convenience, while Google's is arguably more convenient but informs both Google and the merchant as soon as you enter into the store.

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#27

Post by azurezyq »

jakebasile wrote: post #2

I really wish they'd let me set Siri to search DuckDuckGo.

DDG has a long way to go on long tail queries.

In search industry, you can probably spend 1x time and resources to reach 90% Google's relevance score. However, to reach 95% or more, you probably need 100x in time and resources.

E.g., NLP in query understanding; Knowledge Graph in webpage understanding; Much larger corpus; Location awareness, etc.

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#29

Post by KGIII »

willtim wrote: post #25
rtpg wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also made a political stand on the search warrant for that one iPhone that they could have unlocked. A stand that wasn't even popular among the general public ("companies should help police investigate terrorists" polls very well). Being super pedantic, Apple doesn't care about anything, just like a company can't care... but I think it's safe to say that it's not last on the list of things they prioritize.

It seemed more like a marketing stunt to me. The issue was about a single iPhone with a warrant to search it. Apple made it a very public debate about all iPhones.

It's difficult to do with just one phone and toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube. If they do it for the US, what do they do when it's a dissident in China and the party wants the phone unlocked?

Re: Apple switches from Bing to Google for Siri web search on iOS and Mac Spotlight

#30

Post by beaner »

rtpg wrote: post #18
beaner wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple doesn't care about it's users' privacy. It only ever started making a big deal about privacy when people started criticizing Google for hoarding too much personal info and using it to target ads, which people think is evil. Apple doesn't do these things (it's not Apple's business model), so they began heavily marketing "privacy" as something you'd get from them and not the competition. They make sort of okay at…

They also made a political stand on the search warrant for that one iPhone that they could have unlocked. A stand that wasn't even popular among the general public ("companies should help police investigate terrorists" polls very well). Being super pedantic, Apple doesn't care about anything, just like a company can't care... but I think it's safe to say that it's not last on the list of things they prioritize.

I don't think this was a particularly difficult thing to do. they're an almost $800 billion company with one of the most valuable brands in the world and the most loyal followers. They have more of an ability to stand up to these things than anyone. And if they lost, it's not like anything particularly bad was going to happen to them. They'd just have to cede the info. And it was the right thing to do anyway. They had basically nothing at stake.
Post reply on HN