Not really. A search engine crawls the web (billions and billions of sites) and indexes them for quick and easy access. If you use Outlook for email, it's kind of analogous to how the search option works there. When an email arrives on your company's system, the mail server processes the mail and indexes it for searchability. The key here is that either your computer or your mail server have to have a copy to make it searchable.
So, for the case of web searching, you would have to know/read the content on the entire web. This is the "crawling" process that search engines perform. They read it and store/index what they need for searchability. It is entirely infeasible, obviously, for anyone (let alone every person) to do so on their individual devices.
Thanks for the answer! Couldn't Apple crawl the web and store the index for safari to search through? This way, an iPhone user would search Apple's index instead of Bing's, no website needed.
If I understand your question, the answer is that what you describe is basically the same thing currently on Android phones with the Google search widget thing (I think it's called Google Now).
It can perform a search without going to Google's main search page. It may or may not open the results in a browser window, though (I don't know because I don't use it). But regardless, it goes through Google's main search system, much like the proposal you made for Apple.
Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way. Whatever interface you choose to use is just a user preference, really. You're still submitting a query to the site/service over an internet connection and you are getting the response back with the results.
Does that answer your question? I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google or if you were asking something else. Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you should also be concerned with Apple.
>I'm not sure if you were asking if this hypothetical from Apple could avoid using Google
Yes, that is what i was trying to get at!
>Because if you are trying to avoid giving your data to Google, then you should also be concerned with Apple.
Definitely!
>Whether or not it is accessed through the site directly is kind of irrelevant. It's still accessing the same remote system in the same way.
I'm just curious if there's a business opportunity for Apple here. They could basically make mobile safari switch to the hypothetical "Apple Search" for queries made in Safari's address bar (I personally don't search from google.com). It would of course only be worth anything to the end user if they saved time not being routed through google.com
In a similar vein, I've read some comments describing "Siri" as a way to get a bite of the web-search-cake.
Yeah I think there is a business opportunity for them if they really wanted to give it a go. DuckDuckGo leverages Bing, Yahoo, and a number of other sites. I don't see why Apple can't do something similar and forge similar agreements and then use iOS, Siri, and everything else they have as part of their "ecosystem" to drive searches through their new platform.
