In a Financial Times article, Techcrunch suggested that Apple might be developing a search engine competitor to Google. This was “encouraged” by the antitrust activity taken by the U.S. Justice Department, and the investigation that the $1B Google-Apple search deal is getting on Capitol Hill.
The Techcrunch article states that:
“Apple is now showing its own search results and linking directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen in iOS 14. For context, this is a behavior that has been known for a while as people have seen the feature pop up in beta versions of iOS. And the search volume being up on Apple’s crawler is something that Jon Henshaw of Coywolf had noted back in August.
Sources cited by the Financial Times said that the change marked a significant step-change in Apple’s in-house search development and could be the basis for a broader push into search.”
As we mentioned in our previous article, Apple has the technology, money, and market power to be a legitimate competitor to Google. With the Department of Justice scrutinizing the Google-Apple agreement to use Google’s search as Apple’s default search engine, alongside a growing demand for privacy in this current era of late-stage surveillance capitalism, Apple is likely to develop their own search
engine in the coming decade.
Amusingly, as noted by Financial Times and reported by Techcrunch, this drive to end anti-competitive practices will likely give birth to even greater and intense competition between the already dominant and large organizations, instead of competition between established companies and nimble upstart companies.
We tend to forget that the Web started as an even playing field for all, and that is what made it such a big deal. Sadly, ever since Google transitioned into a publicly-traded company, they have tried to restructure the same playing field that was once the basis of their success. Ironically, our sole trust for authentic “competition” is another tech behemoth.
What You Can Do: Get your popcorn ready and keep your eyes glued to what promises to be a long struggle between two technology and corporate giants for the ultimate prize – becoming the ultimate colossal giant.