“Make google search suck less” is something that they didn’t consider.
Defeat the competition by making a good product yourself?? I don’t think so! Stifling innovation is the only way to succeed!
Anyone who never got a chance to use Google Now back in the day really missed out! One of Google’s most useful products to date. It would provide you with the most useful/timely information before you even knew you needed it. Word is, it was so useful that people stopped needing to actively use Google’s services to get the info they needed so they scrapped it. Bastards.
I remember when you could find what you were looking for by googling it. Those were good days. Seriously though, google search, google maps and many other google products simply do not work anymore. They deliberately removed functionality for short term monetary gain and have lost the dominance they once had simply due to their products not working the way they did 10 years ago.
They have no interest in making search better. When 2 out of every 3 searches go through your platform either way, good results lead to fewer page loads which results in lost ad revenue. How are they going to afford to pay Apple $18 billion/year if everyone is getting the info they need?
Google is still the best in my experience, at least for stuff I search for. As long as they’re just slightly better what reason do they have to improve?
Trying to get back to Google after a few years on DDG then Qwant felt really off. Kagi was the real deal for me but it is still to expensive for the average consumer 😕
$5 is too expensive? People have $1,200 phones on financing, buy $5 coffee on the way to work, still drive gasoline vehicles when fuel is $4-6 (in the states) to go ~20 miles, pay $16 for Netflix… like whut? Shit, I’m disabled and living off social security and I still found room in my budget for $5.
My last experiences with Google were non-trivial privacy policy consent request popups that made me leave.
The one before was having to clean up my mother’s laptop after she installed a popular FOSS program from a search result ad infested with ad and malware.
Yeah there was just an article on ars about malware from an ad pretending to be keepass.
would be nice if somebody was serious about search considering Google has all but abandoned it
I agree. However Apple might be trading evil for evil. I wish the Wikimedia Foundation or similar would take on search.
This is my concern. That Apple just forcefully uses its dominance while it still argues its “smaller” than the necessary theeshold for competititive dominance or at least that it remains smaller than like Google and Microsoft in terms of its market share of whatever category()
It’s kinda hard imagining Apple getting into search with how squeaky clean they tend to be about things. Like… picture an Apple search engine returning porn results. Just doesn’t really compute.
Apple got into search years ago, though. If you search in Safari, Apple will provide a single top result (if it has one) above your selected search engine results. Search for a famous person from history and you’ll most likely get a Wikipedia link at the top with the picture and small excerpt. This is powered by Apple’s own search engine. It’s not limited to Wikipedia either but is powered by their Applebot web crawler. If you want to be able to see more than one result, you can use the Spotlight search by swiping down on the home screen. Depending on your search term you’ll have a Websites section with multiple results from their search engine.
What Apple doesn’t offer is a web page for you to access their search engine. Even without it, though, many millions of people have been using Apple’s search engine for years now, clicking on the results usually without even realizing that’s where it came from.
Interesting I hadn’t heard that before. I wonder how sanitized, if at all, those search results are.
Just for you I did a couple of quick searches and discovered something extraordinary. I’ll leave out most of the specific terms I tried but basically anything for an explicit topic just doesn’t have web results at all. It merely offers to search in the browser using your default search engine.
“Masturbation” also had no Apple web results but pulled up a Shortcuts result with the option to turn on the “Do Not Disturb Focus”!
Go change your default search engine on Apple. It’s real easy, I have mine set to DuckDuckGo but they have tons of options that I’ve never heard of.
I was hoping NYT dug up something actually sketchy, but the contents of this article are a nothingburger.
