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

41–50 of 224 posts

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

#41

Post by daveFNbuck »

beaner wrote: post #30
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.

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 ha…

They weren't being asked for info. They were being asked to develop and sign an OS update to bypass any iPhone's security.

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

#42

Post by notsuretho »

partiallypro wrote: post #35
tanilama wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what reason. Apparently, aside from their tight relationship with Google, Bing's result is not good enough for Apple to continue, since DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, who is backed up Bing, I don't see a legit cause for Apple to switch to it.

Quality of results had absolutely nothing to do with the decision, Google and Microsoft bid on the right to be the search engine. Since Microsoft had already been on the platform they may have seen poor or negative ROI from the deal. Google outbid them with a $3 Billion deal, simple as that. Simple searches you would do from your phone would be/are neck and neck between Google and Bing, where they diverge a bit are m…

I’m not as convinced about the quality of text search for bing vs google. I’ve found the former to be inferior in terms of SEO gaming.

That said, it doesn’t use AMP (not relevant here) and its map and images offering is excellent.

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

#43

Post by Kiro »

lemoncucumber wrote: post #4
jakebasile wrote: post #2

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

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 cares about having control over the entire user experience.

Considering DDG is a wrapper for Bing/Yahoo it would be quite the opposite.

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

#45

Post by sidcool »

andy_ppp wrote: post #10
grzm wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$3 billion is the number in the article.

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.

Apple can just acquire DuckDuckGo.

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

#47

Post by 0xbear »

SyneRyder wrote: post #34
dmead wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that true? i thought DDG predates bing?

Apparently DuckDuckGo now gets its web site results from a combination of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. Its focus now seems to be on aggregating results from hundreds of niche search engines and choosing the best engine for a particular search. https://duck.co/help/results/sources

And Yahoo, in turn, gets its results from Bing.

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

#48

Post by partiallypro »

yeukhon wrote: post #38
partiallypro wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality of results had absolutely nothing to do with the decision, Google and Microsoft bid on the right to be the search engine. Since Microsoft had already been on the platform they may have seen poor or negative ROI from the deal. Google outbid them with a $3 Billion deal, simple as that. Simple searches you would do from your phone would be/are neck and neck between Google and Bing, where they diverge a bit are m…

Last part: deal breaker for me. I can't speak for others, but I am going to assume many feel the same. I couldn't stand looking at Yahoo search results. I switched back to Google after Firefox made Yahoo the prefer choicd (the deal with Yahoo)

Yahoo results aren't the same as Bing's; it is merely powered by it, Yahoo still has some control over results and how it uses Bing's service.

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

#49

Post by urda »

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 doesn't care about it's users' privacy

Not sure where this idea came from, but this is so far from the truth it isn't even funny.

1) Focus on encryption everywhere.

2) Privacy controls built into iOS way sooner than Android ever had.

3) Fought (and won) against the FBI demanding a universal backdoor.

4) Developed on-device machine learning tech, even if it isn't as powerful as the collective, it protects users privacy.

5) Fully detailed white papers around iMessage security and encryption.

... and the list goes on. Saying things like that first sentence is just gross negligence to discussing and reporting on facts here on HN.

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

#50

Post by ariwilson »

millstone wrote: post #26
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…

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. Compar…

Apple's just worse than Google at building these kind of heavily data driven web applications, which they've chosen to paper over to the public with a strong stance on privacy. It's a smart business move.
Post reply on HN