Launching a competitor to Google that is the default search engine on all iphones for $15B and 10 years of dev time sounds like a massive win to me.

I think with billions of dollars in funding they could accomplish a "good enough product" in 5 years personally. They don't need to be as good as google.

Apple still cares heavily about user experience, and relies on their brand equity to charge a premium for hardware.

Hard to be the quality leader in the market when your customers find your software inferior.

Safari would be evidence against this.

I don't use it - is Safari really that bad?

> Even a company like Apple couldn't do it in anything under maybe 7-10 years, regardless of how much money they throw at the problem.

Apple has been indexing the web for years, using that for Siri and Spotlight search results. They continue to make improvements to their search capabilities in plain sight.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683

You can safely assume that for any critical external dependencies, Apple is working on one or more Plan Bs.

Google managed it 20 years ago.

Today I guess one can have more than 50 times the compute capacity at around the same price and in way smaller space. (Estimating from Moores law.)

Given that Google has been lowering their quality over the last 10 years it shouldn't be that hard to compete from a technical perspective.

I remember recent conversations (in June) about search engines recently: there was a debate about how Bing, _and_ DuckDuckGo, had confusing responses to “tank man” (not the imagine that Google shows and people suspect the Chinese Communist Party had something to do with it). That highlighted how companies who operate a search engine might have delegate or contract some aspects of it.

It’s not like Apple to not control everything, but they could do something similar to alleviate the effort in the tail end.

Bing and DuckDuckGo are the same, which is why they seem to show similar results. DuckDuckGo has some other features on top of that, but is based on Bing.

No offence but I think you’re wrong. Apple could buy Duck Duck Go or roll their own and LOTS of people would find it good enough or do the first search on the default search engine.

I mean you can disagree with me, no problem with that. I would bet I have more knowledge about shipping major search engines than you do. I have worked extensively on both Bing and Google's search engines and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine. 7-10 years is a really aggressive estimate IMO for something like Google or Bing, and I gave that estimate because I don't think people would believe my "realistic" estimate, even for Apple.

They could buy another search engine, but again getting Duck Duck Go to scale Google scale and relevance is still honestly a massive project.

I think they would risk losing people to Android phones as well. If tech-illiterate people suddenly start seeing that the "search engine" in Apple is terrible compared to Android they could lose customers. Better to just keep taking money, have a great search experience, and focus on other things.

I'm not the typical iPhone owner (since I don't own one) but DDG is not "terrible" by any metric, especially compared to Google. I've used DDG nearly exclusively for a couple of years now, and every time I'm unhappy with the results and try the query on Google, it's no better there.

Are you sure you don’t have predisposition to that conclusion?

> and now work on a third very large (O(exobytes)) search engine.

I'm curious, can you share which one?

Apple can't compete with Google Search by buying Duck Duck Go as it relies on Microsoft Bing's shallow index. Bing (by market share) has failed to compete with Google search. To be good enough it's about scale not necessarily fancy names

Why would Apple buy Duck when they could just sign a deal directly with Microsoft? It’s not like Microsoft won’t know Apple bought Duck when it’s time to renew the contract anyways.