Currently, Apple and Google are involved in a lucrative partnership that nets the former around $8 billion per year. This partnership means that Apple will send its significant user base (think billions!) to Google Search and in return receive a commission from Google’s search advertising revenue. Although Apple benefits immensely, Google still needs Apple to promote its search engine and maintain its market dominance.
This arrangement means that Apple gets several benefits, such as having free resources to improve its non-web search capabilities, and having the world’s most effective bargaining chip when it comes to price negotiations with Google.
Despite this, Apple’s policy has always been to “own the core technologies that underpin its products.” Bloomberg places it. If the tech giant were to ever take advantage of its knowledge and proximity to Google’s search engine, it would have great search power and retain more advertising revenue. It doesn’t have to match Google’s ability to sell ads and search slots. Creating your own internal engine would be more than enough to increase sales.
However, Apple has been developing its own search engine for years. According to Bloomberg, John Giannandrea, a former Google executive who is now responsible for machine learning and AI at Apple, has been leading a search engine team for several years. The engine is codenamed ‘Pegasus’ and is essentially a search engine for Apple’s own apps that will make its way into more of them, including the App Store.
There’s also Spotlight, an engine that helps users find features and tools on their devices. Recently, Apple added web search support to Spotlight, allowing users to find answers to their questions by directing them to different sites.
Apple’s web search has been powered by both Microsoft Bing and Google in the past. Giannandrea and his team have also tried to integrate Apple’s search features into iOS and macOS and enhance that technology with generative AI tools.
There’s also technology that Apple is already using to improve the capabilities of its search tools, including Applebot. It works by searching the web and indexing websites for more accurate search results, giving users more websites via Siri and Spotlight.
Apple also has an ad tech team, something that will bring it much closer to Google if the former ever decides to actually create its own full-fledged search engine.
What’s holding the huge tech giant back? It seems that Apple has no desire to create its own search engines. The partnership with Google works best, at least according to Eddy Cue, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Services.
It’s probably about the money, as Apple tends to maintain partnerships that serve its own interests. If Apple ever decided to fully invest in a search engine, it would just do so, similar to the way Apple partnered with Intel for its chips for years. until it didn’t happen and began designing its own silicon in-house.
A search engine is its own behemoth, which Apple is unlikely to be interested in anytime soon.