Bing is still poor for obscure searches, e.g. today Im searching for other poor folks dealing with ebay's API and the message "Invalid store category name" in quotes. Bing 0, DuckDuckGo 0, Google plenty. Reality is most of my tech searches are like this and hence I can't give up Google, or I can at cost of either my time or my clients. It be nice to have another search engine with depth of Google but nothing comes close, it's like the old days of Yahoo directory vs AltaVista, you could never find the serialz on Yahoo.
While Bing was poor for tech related searches in the earlier days, I find it's no longer true. Are you sure it’s 0 results on Bing? I get a bunch of relevant-looking results, and they’re all different from what Google gave me (just the first page):
Bing said they were using internet explorer to monitor users's activity and copy search results. They're still copying Google search results, just doing it through IE.
I also get a bunch of results using this query on Bing, but the first result with the exact query is #5. You need to add a "+" in front of the quotation marks to get an exact result in Bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=%2B"Invalid+store+category+nam....
I wonder why you don't get the same result in DDG since they are supposed to be pulling results from Bing (that 1 results is from April 5th, so not very recent)?
Using Google, I only get 2 results, so it is not much better...
When I tried I got 2 results on Google, with about 7 if I selected the option to show duplicate results. Is that what you saw?
The results were all on eBay's developer forums, maybe their robots file only allows google?
One advantage to DuckDuckGo is that when searching it was fairly easy to flip and try google with !g and bing with !b after getting no results on DDG.*
It would be nice if bing/google got that feature since it's really handy, and it would be exceedingly nice if they all got the ability to add custom user defined !bang commands.
*However, annoyingly, there was a bug on ddg on iPhone that would clear the search input box when it was clicked to add !g then another error when clicking in the location bar to add the !g that the '"invalid store category name" !g' query was no longer editable instead it was the URL of the encrypted Google search making it difficult to remove the !g and add the !b.
I've got three results (rover.ebay.*) from DuckDuckGo when I turned on region search.
In every region, except "All Regions" and "United States".
Yes, even in "United States (es)" there are 3 english results, but not in "United States"
I admit I revert to Google for some searches, but 99%+ of the time DuckDuckGo works great.
I think the real difference between the searches are Google looks at he context per user. They have the most data and thus the best searches. At the same time I view that as a threat to sovereignty of nation(s), so for me avoiding Google is worth almost any cost.
They need to get this switched over for voice activated Siri, no one in the history of the planet has wanted their hands-free, verbal question answered with a screen full of Bing search results...complete waste.
I could almost see Apple buying DuckDuckGo, given that a) Apple cares about their users' privacy, and b) Apple cares about having control over the entire user experience. DuckDuckGo would fit right in with both of those core pieces of Apple (no pun intended).
I don't think it'll actually happen, but it doesn't seem too far-fetched.
Apple doesn't care about it's users' privacy. It only ever started making a big deal about privacy when people started criticizing Google for hoarding too much personal info and using it to target ads, which people think is evil. Apple doesn't do these things (it's not Apple's business model), so they began heavily marketing "privacy" as something you'd get from them and not the competition. They make sort of okay attempts at privacy, but since they don't collect a lot, they don't need to do a lot, and many of the things they have done have been weak, easily exploitable, or hacked. "Privacy" for Apple is a marketing term like "unbelievable," "magic," and "revolutionary."
Disagree strongly. Apple pays a serious price for their privacy stance, which they would rather not pay. Doing machine learning on-device makes it less effective. Apple's directions aren't as good as they could be because Maps randomly segments trips and masks its users identity. Apple's App Store revenues are lower because they limit how apps can identify users.
This difference is deeper than business models. Compare Google's Hands Free with Apple Pay for example: the same business model (collecting interchange fees) but Apple's approach preserves user's privacy at the cost of some convenience, while Google's is arguably more convenient but informs both Google and the merchant as soon as you enter into the store.
There are further examples that Apple takes privacy seriously: 1) end-to-end encryption of all iMessages
2) encrypted iCloud content
3) making password management accessible to a lot of people who would not pursue it otherwise (with Keychain)
4) attempting MAC address randomization to prevent WiFi tracking, though from this paper [1] it appears to be broken.
Having worked there for a time, in my opinion privacy is deeply ingrained in the company culture. Much easier solutions are avoided if they sacrifice the customer's privacy. Further, it seems many of the decisions are made to minimize the amount of information required at each step to the absolute essentials. These concerns permeate internal technical discussions -- it is not just marketing materials.
They also have pretty extensive privacy materials on their website [2, 3]. While that may not be useful to the HN crowd, hopefully it makes privacy more accessible to some segment of their customers who actually read it.
Apple Genius just asked me for my username and password to my MacBook so he could type it into some service form for repairs. I don't think asking for that info is really compatible with "we care about privacy"
There are a lot of things that employees in the retail stores do that isn't very "Apple". I suspect that's partially from not having as strong culture fit selection in hiring, partially from lack of understanding (when it comes to security, it's a nuanced subject) and partially from the realities of being productive in a retail environment.
the form was an official Apple form for repairs. they are going to replace my keyboard and screen. they said they needed the password to test. I asked why not just boot from a USB drive and they said they could not do that. I didn't ask why they couldnt just swap a drive for testing.
they didn't offer this option I had to suggest it but basically I'll have to reformat the drive before taking it in for service.
I hate to break it to you, but unless you store your home folder on a separate encrypted partition (which would be really inconvenient), this won't work.
FileVault 2 encrypts your entire boot volume, so there's no separate encryption of your home folder going on. If you give someone any of the passwords that unlock the boot volume, they could get all of the data off it (by using target disk mode or booting to single user mode, etc.)
I assume they might want admin permissions honestly.
Having said that, prior to my recent visit (failing mbp fan) my trips had always been for failing/failed discrete graphics (about 5 trips on 2 different generations of 17" mbp) so a reinstall is inevitable because making macOS work properly after a mainboard replacemnt is more work than reinstalling from scratch
When you compare anything to google, it will look as if caring for privacy.
Google is the hugest ad network based on gobbling all privacy from everywhere while Apple is an overpriced hardware seller, of course it will do better on privacy than google. But this does not make apple a privacy oriented company.
The thing is. Both the Suface Pro and Pixel(shining examples of companies not quite being Apple) have sold at exactly the same price as their Apple counterparts for the past few years.
What’s a useful definition of “privacy oriented company” in your mind?
To me, it’s: “a company whose profit incentives are aligned with their user’s privacy.”
You can go on and on about whether they’re “truly” privacy-oriented but to me that’s a meaningless distinction; a company’s profit incentives are the very definition of what they’re “oriented” towards.
Overpriced? Not if they are selling products at te price offered. If they were OVER priced, they would sell zero. If a good is above the price people are willing to pay, they will sell zero. Clearly, that is not the case. An economic nitpick to be sure but factual. They are correctly priced given their sales and profitability numbers.
No, you can have at least one customer even it is overpriced (e. g. if Apple sold the iPhone X for $10,000, it's very like that still at least one person buys it, it definitely would be overpriced though).
It's overpriced if you could make more revenue by lowering the price.
I was referring to the "Not if they are selling products at te price offered. If they were OVER priced, they would sell zero. If a good is above the price people are willing to pay, they will sell zero. Clearly, that is not the case. An economic nitpick to be sure but factual." part, not arguing about Apple's case.
But Apple chooses to implement things in ways that make it way harder for them to do this. Eg Touch ID and facial recognition on the device only, not in the cloud.
Fingerprints and data for face unlock aren't stored in the cloud on Android either. Wouldn't make any sense anyway since I surely want to unlock my phone without Internet access.
That's because of the horrible press they'd get if you couldn't unlock your phone without cell service, or if it took ten seconds when the network was spotty.
We must remind ourselves that Apple is a closed social network based on hardware whereas lets say FB is software. So Apple plan to monetize this walled hardware/software garden for its own needs
Can Apple phones only call or text other Apple phones? Where is the 'buddy list'/graph/contact database that can't be easily ported to another social network?
Apple's just worse than Google at building these kind of heavily data driven web applications, which they've chosen to paper over to the public with a strong stance on privacy. It's a smart business move.
They also made a political stand on the search warrant for that one iPhone that they could have unlocked. A stand that wasn't even popular among the general public ("companies should help police investigate terrorists" polls very well).
Being super pedantic, Apple doesn't care about anything, just like a company can't care... but I think it's safe to say that it's not last on the list of things they prioritize.
I don't think this was a particularly difficult thing to do. they're an almost $800 billion company with one of the most valuable brands in the world and the most loyal followers. They have more of an ability to stand up to these things than anyone. And if they lost, it's not like anything particularly bad was going to happen to them. They'd just have to cede the info. And it was the right thing to do anyway. They had basically nothing at stake.
Except the human cost and resulting PR nightmare if a terrorist attack happened that they could have in principle prevented (e.g. if the terrorist had collaborators, and information on the phone helped find them).
> I don't think this was a particularly difficult thing to do.
Very easy to say when you're not the one responsible for that $800bn company ... if you're a decent human being, you're probably not worried about your own wealth in that situation, but the livelihoods of all your employees and other entities that rely on you. Every decision carries weight. The value of your company is not always empowering; the higher its value, the larger the consequences if you're wrong.
Sorry if I bust your little bubble of joy here but:
Apple is not made of decent human beings and do not care for employees that much. Just look at how their devices are manufactured.
Apple cares about profits and money, just look at their tax evasion schemes and how they store their cash overseas waiting for a tax break to bring it back to the US.
This just isn’t true. Most people are decent human beings. Employees of Apple are no different. Don’t box them in as “the other.” They’re just people.
> Just look at how their devices are manufactured.
This is a valid criticism. Also an industry wide problem. Apple is very transparent with problems in their supply chain, even when it reflects badly on them. This is a problem we have to confront, but it’s far larger than Apple alone.
> tax evasion
There’s a difference between tax evasion and tax avoidance. It’s not good practice for a company to pay more tax than they need to. The appropriate remedy to this is legislation.
how is it difficult to have a stance on privacy while its ok to basically have people manufacturing your devices in conditions you would not accept in your own country? As a leader they have to show the way, its not like they are not drowning in profits and unable to make any change.
Well, the reality is that people buying the product care about privacy, and it is easy for those same people to ignore Foxconn's existence, because it is far away. Businesses, doing what they do, follow that reality.
This doesn't reflect well on anyone involved, but it is pretty much the way things are.
Apple does, in fact, do better than most of the rest on (for want of a better term) progressive issues like this. They were leaders on environmental issues and is willing to fight with shareholders over them[1] (ditto accessibility, presumably as an example of other efforts not directly-ROI impacting).
Manufacturing is tough to change. Even with Apple-style money, creating the sort of hub of interlocking businesses that are needed to fuel large-scale manufacturing businesses takes decades and some secret-sauce we don't understand - Shenzhen wasn't built overnight. And if Apple did somehow build a shiny new manufacturing hub somewhere in Kansas, the products it built would be likely be substantially more expensive.
That said, Apple is building a US factory. See what happens. It might not change anything. Perhaps you believe they should put more money in to the effort. But assuming they aren't doing anything is incorrect.
Sorry to pop your bubble my dear Apple fan boy but they are 300 billion company now :) (assets with revenue of little more than 200 billion). It has been a loooong time since they were 800 billion company.
That was a great 'free' PR boost for them actually, which less informed people take as Apple's great stand on privacy. Apple helped FBI in every possible way for months in their investigation (had also unlocked dozens of phones for them before), even gladly gave away the suspect's iCloud data (so much for customer privacy). It's only when FBI made their next request (to create a backdoor/loophole in brute-force unlocking) public instead of private, when Tim Cook 'had to' show they cared about users' privacy. [0][1]
But in the article you link to as [0] it also says Apple had already refused to comply with an All Writs Act request in an unrelated case several months previously. It doesn’t seem that the under seal request would have made any difference to their actual decision, which they’d already made. This pretty much kills dead any suggestion that they somehow changed their mind for PR reasons, in fact they pretty clearly didn’t want to publicise it hence the seal request.
Also the PR boost from this is far from free. Aside from the huge cost of engineering all this security into the system, to the point of delaying major new features by years in order to get the security architecture into place, its also costing them a chunk of the Chinese market. The Chinese government is absolutely not happy with this sort of consumer privacy stance and has been cracking down on security services and features on the iOS platform. They’ve banned VPN software and features, banned communications apps, even screwing with Apple by barring the iTunes media business, and stalling Apple Pay.
Going up against the US government arguably does Apple no harm, but setting themselves directly at odds with core Chinese government political goals such as pervasive monitoring and censorship of all forms of communications is going to be a real battle.
If they just wanted a marketing advantage, they’d just build in some anti add-tracking features and be done. Security and privacy is so appallingly bad on Android even a perfunctory effort there would put them miles ahead at little cost. The extreme lengths they’re going to goes way beyond anything remotely necessary for a marketing advantage.
Finally, Apples stance on accessibility shows just how serious they are about serving their users. The cost of their accessibility efforts must be dramatically higher than any possible financial or marketing benefit and they’ve been doing it for decades across platforms to little or no fanfare.
Apple isn’t a sovereign state. It’s subject to US law. Sure it can challenge those laws if there’s a realistic chance of winning, but when there isn’t and they’re faced with a court approved demand based on settled law, not so much. They’re a consumer products company not an insurgency against the US system of government. Are you really saying you can’t see that distinction?
The link with accessibility is just evidence that when Apple says they do something to benefit their users because it’s their right thing to do and not for financial gain, that they have history on that to back them up.
Was is a political stand for user privacy or was it a show of power "government cannot force us to do anything" stand ?
They were probably just defending their business model, as a hardware seller the minute it is known worldwide that the US government has a backdoor in their flagship device, apple is over.
It seemed more like a marketing stunt to me. The issue was about a single iPhone with a warrant to search it. Apple made it a very public debate about all iPhones.
It wasn't about all iPhones? As soon as this case started there were twenty other cases just waiting in the wings to jump on it as soon as the tool that law enforcement wanted Apple to create existed at all. Most of them were trivial cases: drugs, petty crime etc.
I've never used an iPhone, but I'm glad Apple put their foot down. The government is a terrible custodian of slippery slopes, don't give them any more.
It's difficult to do with just one phone and toothpaste doesn't go back in the tube. If they do it for the US, what do they do when it's a dissident in China and the party wants the phone unlocked?
Apple was good about privacy and security long before they ever started talking about it. They only started talking about it after the celeb "iCloud hack" (which turned out not to be an iCloud vulnerability [1]).
The fact that they market privacy and security is a good thing if you care about those things. Previously you were just relying on their business model being different from Google's or Microsoft's, but now they're on the record (repeatedly) which also sets them up for a PR crisis if they back down from those positions.
There are plenty of Apple haters that would jump at the opportunity.
The link you give is opinion from a pro apple website, which starts by stating "there was no hack" and "it has nothing to do with icloud security" then proceeds to describe a very common hack and point out some security flaw in icloud.
Try using the official apple statement[1] next time which clearly states that it was a targeted attack and not a breach leading to a full leak.
Of course it was a privacy issue (iphone automatically uploading pictures online) and a weak security design (no 2FA, no email warning of access from an unknown IP, no browser authentication, etc.). There is stronger security on accessing your humble bundle game library.
Also there was a serious icloud vulnerability allowing for bruteforce attack and bypassing account lockout restrictions and secondary authentication[2][3], that it was not used for the fappening does not make it less real.
1) focus on encryption is not the same as focus of strong crypto end to end encryption with forward secrecy.
2) anybody will look good compared to the worst offender
3) because it threatened their business model and profit (also see this[1])
4) I don't get how this protects privacy, not destroying something is only protection in mafia's lingo.
and the debunking list goes on too.
The idea that Apple does not care about user privacy come from the fact that apple does not care user privacy (also US laws such as patriot act and edward snowden revelations). The just like to keep it in their own hands because apple wants to keep control and customers locked in due to being a hardware seller.
Apple doesn't need to collect anything at all for privacy to be a concern. The iPhone stores as much of your information as any other phone by another maker. Which is why Apple's devices are notable for privacy-minded folks, since their hardware and software make it much more difficult to crack into the device than with other phones.
There is nothing "magical", as you say, about how Apple does this. The difference is that, for whatever reason, they do in fact seem to care more about privacy than other companies. Whether that is driven by market sentiment or not does not change this fact.
> They make sort of okay attempts at privacy, but since they don't collect a lot, they don't need to do a lot
Not collecting data in the first place is a pretty big part of respecting user privacy.
Numerous parts of the iCloud-related tech stack in iOS/macOS devices do peer-to-peer syncing between account-linked devices specifically so that data isn't sent to Apple servers. That isn't something you just do by chance and then capitalise on later.
> many of the things they have done have been weak, easily exploitable, or hacked
Apple has a very strict internal culture of privacy. All new features which request user data must go through a rigid internal review process, for example.
Bing/Yahoo/Yandex but the point that Apple is in the position DDG is in to protect user's privacy if they choose to with Siri/Spotlight etc. They can take the search from the phone, strip it of identifying information and forward it to Google then return the results they get back.
You can test that they are doing that by searching for something directly on Google, and then searching for it on Siri. If the results page differ, there is a chance that Siri is not passing along state information to Google.
Please see the part of the comment I quoted. My reply wasn't about privacy. The parent thinks that buying DDG would give Apple full control of the user experience, but is probably unaware of the fact that they wouldn't be in control at all since it's Bing/Yahoo/Yandex providing the actual results.
Search engine providers provide results as json page without decoration. Everything about the user experience is controlled by the code converting that json into display. This is what DDG does.
Everything about the user experience is controlled by the 'front end' which is making a call to the search engine service on its 'back end'.
The only difference here is how much tracking/PII is part of the request that is sent to the search engine. I was saying you can test that by comparing Siri results with those obtained through a web browser which is forwarding cookies full of PII and tracking information.
Apparently DuckDuckGo now gets its web site results from a combination of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex. Its focus now seems to be on aggregating results from hundreds of niche search engines and choosing the best engine for a particular search.
Exactly, there are two commonly used english indexes, Bing and Google. Yandex has one but they closed their local data center so it has a lot of lag getting to it from the US.
Tsignal [1] claims to be building their own index, which if they are would mean there was a third index to choose from.
People seem surprised, but it's perfectly predictable. To maintain an index of sufficient quality and size costs billions of dollars a year. Heck, engineering cost alone is probably $500M for MS, and more for Google. DGG doesn't even come close to having the table stakes to play this game.
Another area where table stakes are incredibly high is geo (maps).
Actually, at Blekko it cost us about $2M/year to hold an index with 5 billion documents, it would have cost use less than $10M/year to hold an index of 10 billion documents (this is suggested by many to be the 'sweet spot' of coverage) to have that many documents you will create a crawl frontier of between 500B and 1T URIs.
“Holding” an index is the trivial part of a search engine. That’s something a single Google engineer can put together in a week (no crawler, just storing and primitive ranker).
What’s going to kill you is ranking (especially in the tail) and keeping the index fresh, including the tail. Ranking requires human input. Keeping it fresh requires some non-trivial effort in the crawler too. And then there’s also serving all of it at 1M QPS, as a prerequisite for creating enough ad revenue to sustain the effort. That requires predictive caching. As a result you get a couple thousand people working on the thing, each pulling down about $400k on average when you total everything up. That’s $800M right off the bat, unless you cut corners like Bing (cleverly) did by stealing your competitors clicks as weak relevance supervision.
Sorry if I wasn't clear, at Blekko we had an index at our peak of 5 billion documents. And we had the full stack to crawl, rank, cleanse, and search that index as well. The crawl frontier was about 300 billion URIs. That was what I meant by "holding".
Findx[1] has its own index and afaik they don't have very much money. DDG obviously has more users, so they have to deal with the number of requests, but that sort of thing scales pretty well.
I believe they initially used Google as their backend. Don't quote me on that though. One thing I know for sure is their search is not really provided by them.
How much will buying DuckDuckGo help if they can't continue using Yahoo, Bing, Yandex, results? I assume the major search engines won't be as happy letting Apple use their indexes as they are with small DuckDuckGo.
What does "the fappening" have to do with privacy? Correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't it just people's weak passwords being guessed and then their iCloud backups being "leaked"?
Pictures automatically being uploaded to icloud is the issue here. Apple will not and maybe cannot snoop in the iphone itself (only for the recent models) but it can, will and has been getting into icloud to give to third parties.
This is mandatory by law for every company operating in the US.
Had this privacy weakness not been in place, it would have been much more difficult to get the pictures. Probably would not have happened as it would have required getting close enough to the devices themselves.
> As is expected with Apple now, searches and results are all encrypted and anonymized and cannot be attributed to any individual user. Once you click on the ‘Show Google results’ link, of course, you’re off to Google and its standard tracking will apply. Clicking directly on a website result will take you straight there, not through Google.
Not perfect, but better than just opening Google directly.
Which is interesting, because one of the reasons I think Google is so good at search is that it personalizes results. When that personalization is removed will it still be as good?
For what reason. Apparently, aside from their tight relationship with Google, Bing's result is not good enough for Apple to continue, since DuckDuckGo is using Yahoo, who is backed up Bing, I don't see a legit cause for Apple to switch to it.
Quality of results had absolutely nothing to do with the decision, Google and Microsoft bid on the right to be the search engine. Since Microsoft had already been on the platform they may have seen poor or negative ROI from the deal. Google outbid them with a $3 Billion deal, simple as that.
Simple searches you would do from your phone would be/are neck and neck between Google and Bing, where they diverge a bit are more complex/technical queries.
Last part: deal breaker for me. I can't speak for others, but I am going to assume many feel the same. I couldn't stand looking at Yahoo search results. I switched back to Google after Firefox made Yahoo the prefer choicd (the deal with Yahoo)
In search industry, you can probably spend 1x time and resources to reach 90% Google's relevance score. However, to reach 95% or more, you probably need 100x in time and resources.
E.g., NLP in query understanding; Knowledge Graph in webpage understanding; Much larger corpus; Location awareness, etc.
For true long tail queries it seems to me that often (speaking only as a Google user, not an expert) the NLP really ends up getting in the way by causing the query to be reinterpreted as something more mainstream. But I agree that it's important for getting high quality results for a lot of common queries. And that quality and relevance scoring of results is also a hard problem.
Why doesn't Apple open their checkbook and start their own search engine. I mean, really open it. It's not like they don't have the money and it's not like this is a logical step.
They can't start small, meaning the need users to train the SE? What else can it be. Of course they can't put live a horrible version...
Have you seen their attempts with Maps. I can't imagine how the search would go. They already have so much bad press with Maps, I'm sure they don't want more added to it.
Have you used Apple Maps recently? It's not that bad anymore. Just because they had bad press about it 5 years ago doesn't mean the product is still stuck in 2012.
From time to time I still accidentally open Apple Maps on my iPhone while searching for some place (tube station, restaurant, store) and almost immediately close it and use Google Maps. Apple Maps is still much worse, the UX is worse and it's much more difficult for me to find things on the map.
Especially tube stations are much more visible on Google maps and I often use tube stations for orientation. On Apple Maps stations are very light color and hard to spot. The same with other landmarks.
I don't understand why they don't do some user testing and find out what UX practices are the reason why Google Maps is so much easier to use and replicate that. They've had years do do this.
From my experience it depends a lot on the country. Apple Maps was for me excellent in China or Japan and terrible in Thailand for example.
Both Google and Apple buy basic maps info from third party and the quality depends a lot on the deal they get. For example it is not possible to save area offline in Google Maps for Thailand due to some legal issues I guess.
Google has much more user engagement and stars and recommendations give Google a big advantage.
I occasionally open Google Maps because I want my search results to include only things on the same continent as the one I live on, and I literally cannot figure out how to get the damn app to give me directions, then I give up and go back to Apple Maps, because while search is filled with nonsense, once I’ve found my destination, it’s non-search UX doesn’t make me want to scream in irritation and confusion.
Possibly worth noting, if you’ve never actually used Apple Maps, you might not know that if you change your routing to transit from the default (car), it will change its POI highlights to emphasize transit stops at the expense of businesses. Might improve your experience, if you felt like giving it a shot.
While your sentiment probably holds correct in some places, it really is "that bad" in some places that aren't the US or the UK. Many countries still don't have transit, and my apartment (in Stockholm!) doesn't even exist in Apple Maps.
Have you ever submitted an error report? I moved house just over 12 months ago and there were some errors on both Apple and Google maps. I submitted error reports to both providers, Apple had it fixed in around 48 hours whereas Google have still not fixed it. At least one of the errors is extremely easy to verify and fix.
Great point. Yeah they got bad press, but are no longer hostage to Google Maps and have an acceptable maps product that gets improved as time goes by. If Tim Cook decides that $10billion in acquisition /hiring is needed for seearch, I'm sure he'll have it in a few hours from the board.
Apple might release the search engine to just a xx% at a time and rotate to see /get data to tweak it (if it's feasible) or make Apple Search default but give option to switch for a few years.
I've been preferring Maps to Google's utterly user-hostile experience for quite a while now.
It's odd - Google does have a great mapping product: it's called Waze. That's great on a phone! But Google Maps? Christ... it's so bad. All of their iPhone apps are downright user-hostile but Maps is the worst.
You mean after Google bought them four years ago? They had independence to a degree and were allowed to stay in Israel for 3 years after signing an agreement, but that time has passed. At this point they are completely under Google.
Is this because Apple is so bad, or just that Google is so much better than everyone else? I’ve never used physical satnav units, but how do they compare to Apples offerings?
The main aftermarket satnav products are from Garmin and TomTom - and in-car systems tend to either license their tech or use NavTeq/HERE. Even Apple Maps bootstrapped off TomTom and still largely just aggregates from other sources.
I use iOS, but I very much prefer using Google Maps to Apple Maps: mainly for the Google Account integration, and it feels like they provide more information (shop/restaurant hours, street-view) even though Apple Maps provides almost the same level of detail. On my desktop I use a Google Maps and the map design is the same so familiarity helps, whereas Apple Maps is strictly off-limits for Windows and Linux users.
Given that Apple and Microsoft are no-longer competing in the mobile space (MSFT finally admitted Windows Phone's failure earlier this year) maybe we can see Apple choosing MSFT/Bing services over Google? Apple could save a lot of money by switching to Bing Maps, and with a re-skin no-one would notice!
It varies by location a lot, but here in central Europe, Garmin units (including builtin satnav) tend to be more accurate and carry more car-relevant information (speed limits, etc.) than Apple Maps.
Same goes for Google Maps as well, which still don't have speed limits available which is kind of critical when driving through unfamiliar streets.
Probably because it costs a serious amount of money to make, requires a very expensive infrastructure with high maintenance cost and does not bring in any serious money.
>>it costs a serious amount of money to make, requires a very expensive infrastructure with high maintenance cost...Also they probably lack the skill to do this.... "
all solved by money, virtually unlimited money as Apple makes $45+ billion in income each year and has some $200+ billion in bank. They can bid against google for google's top search engineers and Google will run out of money first..
There is a lot of money in search, maybe not as much as Google is making now (90% of their page is ads) but still a lot money, more than enough to make the investment worthwhile.
OP seems to be saying to throw a ton of money at search. Microsoft spent billions in losses over the past decade. Profitable now, but market share isn't too strong. And a lot of the market share gains are from Yahoo anyway.
So I agree. I don't see how Yahoo double or triple spending what Bing spent helping. Especially if they start out in 2017. On the other hand, if they work with Bing and have some sort of search engine Joint Venture with money and smarts poured in, maybe they can put a dent into search. I doubt Apple who care about profits so much would be down for such an endeavor.
They've tried hard with Bing for so many years now. It's also profitable. They re-did their Yahoo deal a few years ago too. They care about Bing it seems, but it's clear they can't make much headway.
You're right: not zero, but I suspect just a rounding error on their books. Apple's ability to monetize ads, particularly given their stance on privacy, is suspect, and I'm not sure how else one would make money with a search engine.
I've been trying to use bing as a primary and google as a backup for a few months now. IME, Bing is good 60-70% of the time, but often times I'm exploratory-searching and bing is pretty much useless here. Google, manages to somehow find the right link, especially when I am guessing the keywords. On a side note, Google often tells me theres million+ results (e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=SIEMENS+pc+based+automation ) and then shows me only 10 pages of 10 each. Seems like over the years Google has been pruning the results quite a bit.
I went all the way to page 10. At the bottom, it reads :
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 100 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
Yeah, but that still doesn't show all the supposedly millions of results. Last time I checked it was capped at a few hundred (not this specific query).
I have heard from ex-Bing engineers that Microsoft had deprioritized search R&D a couple of years ago. Since then there has been an exodus of engineers from that group.
I wonder how this will work with apples recent fight against online advertisers. If google does track users but it is all anonymous from the advertisers perspective, does that mean Apple is okay with it?
Maybe thats the reason they went back with Google now they didnt want Google to have apple customer data for competitive reason but now that they have a system in place to block that they have gone with the best search engine.
And one wonders why it is impossible for a new search engine to get started :-) When Google started paying over a billion dollars a year to buy search traffic it was pretty clear that it was not going to be possible to grow a new full stack search engine organically.
Now they are over $4B/year buying traffic, its pretty crazy.
I believe that when it comes to search, the aim should not be about competing with Google in it's current form. That is impossible. The aim should be to change the architecture of search such that it becomes a commodity that anyone can plug into. Like what open source CMSes did to the AOL/Time Warner giant. Then the owners of this commoditized search can charge for their premium API on a usage basis, transforming search into an ad-free service found anywhere
I think that is an excellent vision but to understand the challenge of achieving it consider how a search engine has to operate. Typically it 'shards' the index of all available documents into chunks, where the necessary descriptive bits for a chunk can fit in the memory of a dense memory server. Then each server returns its "best" result which are collected, and from there the top 10 are selected.
Search needs to be fast. When you click search you want the page to then pop up with your 10 blue links. The physics of light suggest that your index files all need to be close together, both physically and with high bandwidth to support a couple of round trips for distributing the query and returning the results.
While I learned how search worked while I worked at Google, it was a brilliant engineer named Keith Peterson at Blekko (now at Google :-) who taught me some of the more subtle issues involved in balancing indexes, shards, and query processing in order to maximize utilization.
That requirement of closeness and high bandwidth, makes federation hard. Even forwarding a search to Bing (via the Yahoo APIs) to check for additional "long tail" results really challenges your ability to deliver fast results.
Unlike CMSes where they could run independently in parallel, search is a 'talk to everyone all the time' sort of problem, you don't know apriori which indices may have relevant documents (which is why it is called "search" ;-))
With the amount of data Apple has from Siri I’m constantly surprised they don’t at least have a stab at building a search engine, possibly one with very fine grained privacy/accuracy controls.
For the specific context of privacy, they have had more fine-grained controls than Android since the inception of the appstore, until release of Android 6.0 where Android AFAIK has caught up.
Almost, but still not. There’s still no way to revoke android.permission.INTERNET
And if you revoke any permission to any Google apps, all of them will refuse to do shit, and you can’t even place calls without giving Google access to your location, body sensors, bluetooth, etc.
Isn't that just mostly using major search engine indexes? I know DDG some of its own indexing, but how much do they really do on their own? I don't see the benefit of getting DDG for them when they'll have to deal with the major search engines providing most of the data anyway.
You mean the account you use to criticize and judge almost everyone on the planet [0] [1] [2] [3]? Now that's very intelligent, adult, and open-minded isn't it? :)
Yes. I am using a throwaway exactly because of this close scrutiny like yours. Examples: I've known racists who are amazing engineers. The fact that they were awful racists didn't demean their engineering ability. That's why for some of my posts I prefer being anonymous. People like you would probably try and demean me because they disagree with me on something.
I am flawed like everybody else and I'll be the first to admit my own prejudices -- even if I am not ready to overcome them at the moment (which is a sad reality for most of us).
But the amount of nitpick and prejudice I am observing periodically on HN is alarming and I feel the need to call it out here and there.
You can take it as an insult or you can try and extract something from the criticism that can enrich you. It's your choice.
Also please note that I am not defending Apple per se. But I expect better criticisms on HN compared to what is rampant right here in this thread.
I was not trying to demean you, but the hypocrisy needed to be pointed out. It's new to me that someone maintains another account for his wildly generalized critical posts and then uses that to preach the exact opposite to others.
One can easily get fed up and thus resort to a throwaway account. Hypocrisy is one way of looking at it. I'll not argue as to how you should be looking at it through my point of view.
If anything, I have numerous anecdotal evidence for my generalizations. But we all do, so that's not really a defensible position, I realize that. :)
My original objection is that many people in the thread, right here in HN, the place that should be where the modern intellectual elite hangs out, are no better than your random Google zealot who never misses the chance to piss on people for using Apple devices.
All of us should do better. I appreciate your criticism of my generalizations. While I think they are well-justified in the background of my life's experience, I am still not blind to the fact that they are prejudices as well.
It's not about Google, but about Apple being privacy-oriented. The argument is that people wouldn't call Apple privacy-oriented if it weren't for its competitors like Google being even worse in that regard.
Yes. Insulting people on the basis of using Apple products should disqualify them from any discussion beyond drunk jokes on a table in the suburbs.
(Disclaimer #38274932: I am not defending Apple per se. I find them pretty shady in a number of aspects as well as Google. But what is happening in this thread is just shameful.)
