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Inside Google’s Plan to Stop Apple From Getting Serious About Search
(www.nytimes.com)
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this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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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"!
Cool of you to go to the trouble. Not super surprising that'd be the result. Really makes you wonder how Apple would approach having a proper search competitor to Google.