
Jobs at Apple-Search - no_gravity
https://jobs.apple.com/us/search?job=36607344&openJobId=36607344#&openJobId=36607344
======
0x0
This could explain the User-Agent "apple/0.1" that has started showing up in
apache logs from IP addresses starting with "17."....

------
serve_yay
It could be app search, pretty much everything about discovery on the App
Store sucks right now.

~~~
MrGando
I agree, Apple has a lot of efforts going on right now, I doubt they want to
tackle Web Based Search (ala Google)... though it's just one position.

~~~
wlesieutre
If anything, web search would be counterproductive for them. Google likes
search because you see ads on search results then go to other pages and see
more ads.

Apple doesn't have that incentive; if anything they want to keep you in the
App Store's curated experiences. Why send someone to an Open Street Maps
website instead of one of the various OSM clients on iOS where you can get
extra features via in-app-purchase?

~~~
0x0
Maybe they actually just want their end users to have a great web search
experience? They added DuckDuckGo as an option to their OSes recently and I'm
sure they would be happy to not feed any more traffic to Google than strictly
necessary.

It could benefit Siri making the built in web search more intelligent instead
of leveraging a 3rd party API who might even charge for access since there's
no ads.

It might even sell more devices if they make it an Apple device exclusive
service, or at least as a gateway to lure new customers kinda like the online
versions of icloud/pages/numbers/keynote.

------
mmanfrin
I am doubtful this is to take on Google directly, and I am sincerely doubtful
that they'd be able to pull it off if it was. Microsoft funneled billions in
to competing, and it has mostly fizzled. Google has had too much of a head
start to be competed with head-on.

~~~
abalone
Apple has two things Bing & Google don't:

1) an ad-free business model

2) control of Siri & Spotlight, the native search functions on a huge swath of
devices

I'd say they have a fighting chance.

~~~
robotresearcher
A fighting chance of what? Unless they monetize search, it's just a cost. What
ad-free business model can monetize search?

Unless they are paying Google a fortune to be the current engine, and rolling
their own is cheaper. This seems unlikely.

~~~
abalone
> What ad-free business model can monetize search?

The one where you make craptons of profits selling high-margin devices that
come bundled with services that offer ad-free user experiences and maximum
privacy.

And it's Google that pays Apple a fortune to be the current engine, not the
other way around. Just to give you an idea of who holds the cards here.

~~~
bobajeff
There is no way they would make enough from iPhones/iPads to pay for the costs
of building and running a competitive web search engine. (At least not one
built like Google and Bing are)

There is a reason they take a cut of profits from App developers; it's to help
pay for the cost of running the App store.

~~~
redler
They're generating profits at a rate of $200 Million per day [sic]. It's fair
to say they make enough to pay for the costs of almost anything, including
this. You've identified the one requirement they can in fact satisfy; the hard
part is... everything else.

Edit: Clarity

~~~
bobajeff
You may be right.

Assuming you're right about their profits, that's 18B per quarter. Operating
cost have been said to be around 5B per quarter for Google and 1.25B per
quarter for Bing.

~~~
abalone
Source please?

Bear in mind they're already running their own competitive map service for
exactly the same reasons I say they want to run their own web search. And
that's probably not cheap either.

~~~
bobajeff
My source for the costs of Google:
[http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/23/from-...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/07/23/from-112-servers-
to-5b-spent-on-google-data-centers-per-quarter/)

"Google data centers cost the company more than $5 billion in the second
quarter of 2014"

My source for the costs of Bing: [http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-
bing-losing-billion...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-losing-
billions-2011-4)

"Put differently, Bing is spending $5.5 billion a year to generate $3 billion
of revenue." (I divided by four to get quarterly)

GPS data is not really on the same level as Web Crawl data. How often is a
street added or changed versus a web page?

~~~
abalone
1\. $5B is super way off. First of all you are lumping one-time construction
costs in with the incremental costs of running the data centers. The article
clearly states the bucket in which data center operational costs are included
is $2.82B.

2\. Even that bucket is a grab bag of other costs as well such as amortization
of acquired assets (not necessarily for data centers). Additionally while web
search is major it is certainly not the only thing that Google data centers
do; for example they run Gmail and an AWS competitor on it. So it's very hard
to determine just what the operational cost of web search is, but it's
certainly well under $2.82B.

3\. The Bing article clearly states its major cost increases are "costs
associated with the Yahoo! search agreement and increased traffic acquisition
costs", i.e. promotional not operational costs. This is not applicable to
Apple, who already _gets_ paid for traffic.

4\. As for maps it's not just GPS data, it's road and signage and building
data including visual imagery. That's many orders of magnitude more expensive
to gather than loading a web page (even loading it 1000 times). You have to
roll trucks and fly planes. In fact there was just a story yesterday about
Apple rolling trucks to start gathering competing "streetview" data.. all from
scratch.

~~~
bobajeff
Chatting about this with you made me challenge my knowledge of how web search
works. Many articles I've found suggest that the hardest problem to solve
isn't competing on the size of Google but the relevance of Google. Which is
partly to do with the size and power of their datacenters. But also to do with
smart engineering of the servers, database, and algorithms. The algorithms not
only determine the how to order the results but which pages to crawl and how
often.

What this all makes me think of is all the work being put into AI research
lately. IBM, Google, Facebook, Baidu etc. There is a race to AI and the winner
could very well make a better Google.

------
billclerico
I think it's more likely associated with Spotlight vs a web search engine

~~~
bsaul
Or a better search tool through all itunes content ( apps, books, courses,
etc).

~~~
seattlewag
Agreed. And to do this "local" search you could imagine it being much better
using signal from the web (who is linking to what content in iTunes, etc).

------
zend3v
I've wondered to myself why they didn't buy DuckDuckGo and just integrate. I'm
sure there are 1000 good reasons not to do it, but I did wonder it to myself.
Especially since they seemed to put it in the spotlight with the iOS8/Yosemite
release. Privacy is now a legitimate selling point and people would probably
be willing to pay for services and tools that value that. But I guess there is
no value in buying it so that would be why.

------
porsupah
Possibly not significant, but I noticed the location's given as San Francisco
- normally, Cupertino-based positions are tagged as "Santa Clara Valley".

------
tdfx
Just curious, but what salary do you think an "engineering product manager" at
Apple makes?

~~~
inerte
[http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Apple-San-Francisco-
Salar...](http://www.glassdoor.com/GD/Salary/Apple-San-Francisco-Salaries-
EI_IE1138.0,5_IL.6,19_IM759.htm?filter.jobTitleFTS=Engineering+Project+Manager)

------
jyku404
Search != Web Search.

Besides web crawling almost seems quaint nowadays, they have other data they
could better unearth or improve existing search functions.

------
Animats
That job ad doesn't indicate that Apple is going into the search business.
Getting into search would need a bigger team.

Given the publicity, this may be a bluff by Apple. Yahoo did something
similar. In early 2014, Marissa Mayer announced that Yahoo was going to build
their own search engine. Nothing happened. That seems to have been a ploy to
get a better deal from Bing.

~~~
yeukhon
> Nothing happened.

First hand or just based on trend?

~~~
Animats
Yahoo never staffed up to build a search engine. That would have been noticed
in Silicon Valley. They hired a VP for search whose previous area of expertise
was negotiating with Microsoft.

------
yeukhon
I suspect content search. Imagine people's home filled with Apple TV, Macbook
and iPad. Now what you need is content search. TV program search is done, and
it isn't really much exciting than Netflix's suggestion. What about content
people bought? Browsing history? Payment history? Medical? Calendar? Travel?
Weather? They have a whole ecosystem they built since last release. As other
speculates, a refined but better, unified version of spotlight, not just for
iOS or OSX, but a truly search with their devices connected. With Sri now you
can ask at home like Amazon's Echo, or ask Sri when you are driving. Content
search is what matter these days.

------
spullara
If there is one company that has the pockets and audience big enough to
compete it is Apple. They will have to a hire an enormous number of the best
search people to do it though.

~~~
grecy
As with a few of their other skunkworks (POWER->X86) we have no way of knowing
if they've already been hard at work on it for years and years.

~~~
fpgeek
The Apple Maps experience is evidence against that, though. We know that they
were working on maps for years and things like PoI search were among the
biggest issues. I find it hard to believe they would have done that badly if
they had an in-house search team (if only because such a team would have been
good at flagging problems and suggesting solutions).

~~~
spullara
I agree. I don't think you can hide hiring the right search people. They have
pulled in a few search companies, but nothing at the scale necessary (e.g.
Topsy).

------
blackkettle
> ... detailed oriented projects

...

------
gazarsgo
Apple was at Lucene Revolution in DC this past fall. It's a little silly IMO
to extrapolate too much from a job posting -- Apple has had a large search
infrastructure for a long time, as do most tech companies.

------
IBM
I'm really not sure why people think Apple would get into the web search
business. Web search represents just a fraction of the total advertising
spending that other web companies like Facebook aren't even bothering to chase
Google for it. Google's stock has been in the toilet this year because their
core business is facing shrinking ad margins from the shift to mobile, it
doesn't make any financial sense to get into that business.

Add that to the fact that this is completely out of Apple's wheelhouse and
their history of relatively never straying out of their circle of competence
and it should be pretty clear that this isn't for web search.

